Photographing Seascapes // The Gear, The techniques, the Apps

this video is brought to you by squarespace seascape photography is probably my favorite sub-genre of landscape photography i think the reason for that is because you can set up with a composition you can take the same photo over and over and over and every single frame is going to be a little bit different because of the water flow the dynamic difference that the water flow has in an image completely changes the the feeling the energy and the visual flow of the photo [Music] so in this video i want to share with you guys some of the technique stuff that goes into you know making things a little bit easier for yourself when you're gonna go shoot seascape photography so first and probably the most important is you have to have some kind of knowledge going in about tides and swell conditions there's a lot of different resources for checking tide and swell height some are a little bit more accurate than others others are a little bit more optimistic i would say but the two that i prefer is first of all the app that's called magic seaweed i know it's available on ios i i assume that it's available on android as well but what's cool about magic seaweed is that you can not only check the tide heights and times so you know when high tide is when low tide is and how high and low those tides are but you can also check the swell height swell height is essentially going to be the size of the waves as well as the frequency of those waves and it gives you a sense for how safe is this beach going to be and whether that particular beach is going to have large enough waves to even be interesting on that particular day so magic seaweed is probably my favorite app for checking tide and swell height also if you're already a user of windy it's another weather app you can go over to the right and you can change the change the overlay to waves that way you can actually see a wave height prediction there as well so with seascape photography there's a lot of gear that really helps make the shooting experience a little bit better and you know there's a lot of gear that i keep around pretty much just for seascape photography so i want to share some of that stuff with you now the first and probably most important piece of gear for shooting ski scapes for me are these nrs boundary socks now these are essentially a knee-high wetsuit or dry suit i guess it would be it goes up to your knee and then it seals against your skin up at the top of just under your knee what's awesome about these is first of all they are small they are light but they are 100 waterproof so i can be shooting in waist deep water and my feet and toes most importantly will be warm and dry my thighs might get wet but my feet are gonna stay dry now this does several things first of all it gives you way more patience when you're shooting in cold water you know you might be able to tough it out for a minute or two but it's really hard to remain calm and patient with freezing cold feet so even if the water is just kind of cold you know i could probably tough it out this is way way more comfortable and it's better for your photography because you're going to have the patience to do it right one of the things that you'll see other photographers use it a lot of times are like you know those muck boots like either wellies they're called in the uk or muck boots the problem with those is that they don't seal at the knee granted you know these these are a whole lot lighter they travel a lot better and a muck boot if the water goes over the top of this you know over the top of the boot you're going to get water seeping inside you're going to end up with wet feet these are not only smaller and lighter but they're 100 waterproof and they seal so no matter what my feet stay dry so these are probably the best investment i've ever made for my landscape photography they're awesome in streams they're awesome in any kind of cold water another small simple thing that i always have with me when i'm shooting seascapes are just like a couple of cheap little microfiber towels so you know you can get these at an auto parts store or walmart whatever i got these off of amazon but what i like these for is first of all if if you get splashed you need a way to get all of that salt water off your gear as quickly as possible because salt water is incredibly corrosive you want to get that off as quickly as possible so having just a couple microfiber towels helps to get that water off also if it starts to rain or if you're in a situation where you know you're gonna get splashed i will just take the towel and drape it over the top of my camera that way the water soaks into the towel and doesn't actually get to my camera and it's not as cumbersome and annoying as having like you know an actual rain cover on my camera i hate rain covers i should use them i know but they're just so cumbersome they annoy me they and i don't use them so having just a couple of little microfiber towels that you can dry off your equipment with very very handy to have so the next thing that i've grown to really love when shooting around water of any kind are these little chemtech scientific lens wipes so essentially all they are are little like kleenex tissue things they're just a little tissue this whole box is like five six bucks something like that and there's hundreds of them in here and what's nice about these is they are incredibly absorbent so if you try to wipe you know moisture off of your lens with a lens cloth you just really just push it around because your lens cloth is not very moisture absorbent but these are hyper absorbent so you get it anywhere near that water it just sucks it up and i know some people will be out there with a rocket blower and try to push the moisture off of the lens i prefer to just use these they are a little they're lint free so they're not going to leave lint on your lens but they you want to be careful not to press too hard because potentially you could eventually you know put a put scratches in the coating on your front element i've never had an issue with that but they're really great for soaking up some of the moisture that might get on your front element very handy to just have a couple of these in your pocket so the next thing that is incredibly useful are shutter releases so in a seascape type situation you're trying to time the exact moment of the wave you know maybe it's the shape of a particular wave as it flows back away from the camera maybe it's as it comes towards you maybe i'm shooting telephoto and i'm trying to get that exact moment at the peak of a splash shutter releases are incredibly useful when photographing seascapes because well for one we don't want to be hitting our shutter button when we're doing half second exposures we're going to end up introducing a little bit of you know camera shake and we're going to not get sharp images so and a two second timer you can't that's not really a good option either because it's hard to time things accurately two seconds in advance so having a shutter release of any kind is going to be very useful i prefer these wireless shutter releases because i can be you know back 200 feet away in my nice warm car sometimes and take images so it's really really useful to have uh shutter releases when shooting seascapes so anybody that's shot seascapes before on a beach knows that when that first wave comes in and then recedes out your tripod will shake and shimmy as the sand is undermined from underneath this feet of your tripod i've seen people use like cds underneath the feet of their tripods and while it kind of might work it's you know that's not the best way to do it the best way to do it is to use big spikes on the feet of your tripod so there's a lot of these available out there there's some cheap ones from like desmond the this is on my flm tripod these particular spikes are made by really right stuff and they're about three inches long what's cool about this is that as that first wave comes in or the first couple waves come in as it recedes out i will jam the feet of my tripod down into the sand and push it down and then from then on it's already going to be dug in like i don't know four inches underneath the sand that way future waves that come in are not going to affect my tripod at all it's going to have a nice solid firm base underneath the sand and i'm never going to have any kind of tripod movement after that so spikes on the bottom of your tripod feet are amazing when shooting on beaches so one of the first practical things i want to share with you guys is kind of a simple one it seems like common sense but it's amazing how many people don't think about it you always want to extend this last section of legs first when you're shooting on a beach or in mud or any kind of situation like that the reason for that is you don't want to have your tripod like this and then jam it down into the sand and then shove the first joint of your legs down into the sand because you're going to be filling these threads with a whole bunch of sea salt and sand you don't want that so even when i'm shooting low i always extend this bottom set of legs at least a little bit that's going to keep these joints out of the sand and keep them from needing to be cleaned like immediately it's pretty miserable when you get that first section whether it's a twist lock or a flip lock you get that full of sand and it's going to suck so don't do that when photographing seascapes shutter speed is king the shutter speed that you choose is going to be the most important creative decision you are making because the shutter speed you choose when you're photographing moving water is going to completely dictate the the energy of the photo the feeling of the photo the you know the amount of of water movement in the photo when you're photographing moving water shutter speed is the most important creative choice you have so don't decide at that point what looks best give yourself options so you're going back to the computer with a whole bunch of options for that one composition spend a little time getting that composition the way you want it and then shoot it with multiple different shutter speeds and a whole bunch of different frames experiment and go home with options one of the things that i like to do is once i get home sometimes i will find that it it requires multiple different frames to get the feeling that i want for that photo in this particular image i loved the wet the power of the location but i also liked the way that the water was kind of cascading falling into into the sinkhole so to get that feeling that i felt when i was there i felt like i needed both i needed the beautiful way that the water was cascading into that sinkhole but i also wanted the way that the wave was splashing over the edge it gives it a little bit more of a frantic energetic feel and i liked that for the background because i was feeling that at the time it's a pretty intimidating place to shoot so if you hold the same composition you can blend multiple frames together to more completely tell the tale of what it was like to be there and sometimes that requires multiple shutter speeds which i call shutter speed stacking another really important thing when you're photographing moving water just a water scene is to remember that if you do have you know bright highlights in your sky you've got to keep an eye on bright highlights in your water as well it's really difficult to exposure blend any kind of blown highlights in water you can do it in the sky because the sky is not moving as dramatically between frames as that water is so try really hard not to ever blow the highlights in the water if you blow the highlights in the part of the sky you know obviously the area around the sun you can fix that you can exposure blend a darker frame in for that but you can't do it for water so make sure that for you the majority of your foreground you are not blowing out any highlights in your water super important also once you find that composition where you find an interesting thing the water is doing make sure that the water flow is leading the eye back into an interesting area you have to really pay attention to where the lines in your photo go if it goes off into an area of the photo that you really don't want the eye to go to you're better off to take more frames and try to get to get a composition where you have the water flowing back towards an area of the photo that you would like the eye to go so you're creating really strong lines by having that water movement make sure that that movement is going where you want it to go i like to find some kind of rock formation in the background that the water movement is bringing the eye back towards or sometimes it's just something as simple as you know the beautiful sunset in the background just make sure that those lines are leading back to an area of the photo that you want the viewer's eye to go to and lastly because a lot of times i like to photograph big wide angle seascapes where i'm you know using a wide angle lens i'm tilted down i'm really exaggerating the water flow those kind of shots really only work when the sky is doing something that you know is also interesting because that sky is going to take up at least a third of the photo and if there's nothing of interest up high what i prefer to do is i prefer to shoot telephoto and eliminate a lot of that sky and there's a lot of interesting things that happen when you shoot seascape's telephoto a lot of times you're zooming in on energetic areas if the sky is lame or not as interesting i try to zoom in past that uninteresting sky and fill the frame up with an area of action in the background with seascapes it's oftentimes it's waves crashing over rocks maybe it's you know a lighthouse in the background that has beautiful waves underneath it there's a lot of telephoto landscapes in a seascape environment to be found out there and when the sky is not working for you just start to eliminate it by shooting more telephoto this video is brought to you by squarespace so i have used squarespace pretty much from the very beginning with my own personal website there was a time that i tried using another website building platform before squarespace but i could never get it to look the way i wanted and then once i switched over to squarespace i found it incredibly easy to just drag my photos onto the onto the webpage builder i could set up my galleries to make them look exactly the way i wanted them it was really easy i didn't have to learn to code or anything like that also for me the most important part of the squarespace platform is how easy they make the e-commerce so i obviously sell workshops and calendars and prints and all of that kind of stuff and you can do that all right there inside of squarespace it's incredibly easy and it's a good thing because you know i'm me so if you're interested in giving squarespace a try go to squarespace.com forward slash nick page and that's going to get you 10 off your first purchase thank you squarespace hopefully there's been a nugget or two in this video for you guys if you guys like this content please like subscribe ding a ling the bell for me and hopefully there's been a nugget or two in this video that you guys can use the next time you guys go out to photograph seascapes take it easy everybody we'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Nick Page

Views: 41,056

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, nick page, travel, seascapes, seascape photography, ocean photography, tips for seascapes, landscape photography tips, tutorial, tide information

Id: pOrxVZwTWkU

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020