Yachats, Oregon, is about a six hour drive from Seattle and if you get full cooperation from the clouds, the tides, the moon, etc, it’s worth every minute of it. But as rare as the confluence of naturally occurring factors is, it’s even more rare to see me up at five in the morning - I like to do the night photography thing before going to bed.

The sun was set to rise at 7:30AM and the moon would set at 10:30AM so the moon would still be high in the sky around 5:00AM and would be bright enough to back-light the clouds. The clouds turned out to be a little thicker than I hoped but there was still enough light to provide backing to the clouds and also to squeeze in a couple night photography hours before the sun rose.

This is three 90 second exposures at ISO 400 averaged to reduce noise. Shorter, averaged exposures are often a better option on the coast because you never know (if you’re close enough) when you’ll have to grab everything and run to get out of the way of the ocean. It’s better in my opinion to use a higher ISO and stack/average n well exposed images to improve the quality of a “good” exposure than to try one really long exposure at the lowest ISO that only lasts half as long as it needs to. A single image at ISO 400 using the “expose to the right” technique will be better than an under-exposed ISO 100 exposure pushed two stops to match.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.