Well, winter is without a doubt upon us here in South Africa, especially true for the Western and Eastern Cape where we have been having rain for at least two-thirds of the week and as luck seems to always have it, the rainiest days occur on the weekends. Because of these conditions I have been unable to go out in the field in a couple of weeks and thus have nothing to really write home about, though I will be heading to the Helderberg Nature Reserve tomorrow afternoon during my lunch hour to make the most of what is supposed to be partly cloudy conditions before the next series of cold fronts engulf both the sun and my opportunities.
I did manage to go down to Strand beach a couple of nights ago though just as a cold front had passed by and unfortunately the condition weren’t what I was hoping for, I hadn’t looked at the tide table, but upon arriving at the beach it didn’t take me long to see that the tide was extremely high with no sign of the tidal pool rocks where I had planned to shoot, rough seas and less clouds than I was hoping for. I did however try to make the most of the situation and set myself up near a fairly well lit area of beach and set up my tripod with my remote shutter release.
With the rough seas I wanted to see the results of an extra long exposure time and how it would capture the motion of the water, especially the white breaking of the waves. I set the ISO to 100 to reduce any potential noise issues from the long exposure on a consumer price DSLR, setting the F-stop to around F9 or so. After testing out the exposure times I settled on a 3-and-a-half minute shutter speed and took some shots facing west-north-west in the general direction of Cape Town. The results were definitely interesting with the white of the crashing waves merging in motion to form what looked like an endless extension of sand.
The rest of the week thus far has been raining once more, pretty much non stop, forcing me to look into my archive of photographs from the years gone by. There weren’t many that I hadn’t already milked but I decided that to at least keep things going on the blog, and for my own comfort in not feeling like I have become completely static, I have included some old photographs of various times and types below. But I hope to be able to get out to do some birding soon!
