📷 Sea of Fog

📷 Sea of Fog | Ecency

First of all, it's not the fog :)

It's nice to sometimes play with long exposure for photos with water. Starting a few seconds of exposure, all moving waves are strongly blurred (and the longer - the more). So much that they become like fog, a sea of fog. The waves really have to move, even splash on the stones, in order to get such an effect — this will not work with calm, still water, on the contrary, it will look like a smooth mirror in the photo.

Such a foggy haze creates a special atmosphere in the picture — calm, thoughtful, relaxed. Especially if there is no bright sunlight. In general, I often like these kinds of photos.

This is an interesting effect, and for some time I got so carried away by it that very often I shot waterfalls and sea waves only at long exposure, using darkening filters for the lens if I did it on a bright sunny day. However, over time, I realized that I should not do this all the time — the feeling of movement in the picture is lost, but this is also beautiful: frozen splashes of water from a splashing wave (for example, as in this photo) or an uneven flow of water along a stream of a waterfall.

I am also sometimes interested in doing something in between. At a shutter speed of about 0.5 to 1 second, on the shot, in the absence of super-distinct, frozen in time details like water drops hanging in the air or the crests of rolling waves, there still remains dynamics, which shows movement more clearly than fog. For comparison, look at the photo below: although here the shutter speed is still slightly long — 1.3 seconds, you can see the movement of the wave more clearly, and in the first photo of this post, the shutter speed is 8 seconds.

Well, different moods, scenes and landscapes need different camera settings. I like all options :) All today's photos were taken somewhere on the coast of the South Island, New Zealand.

It's better to watch the photo in high resolution.