Another gale swept across Lake Michigan last Saturday. For the most part, the light wasn't great and the contrast of the billowing clouds of spray against the sky was poor. There was 30 minutes of light though that were worth waiting for, which is when the image below was shot.



This image is one of a 22 frame sequence shot at 4 frames/sec that now lives in real time as an animated GIF on my website. The animation is relatively large, 2.9 Mbytes, and will hence take some time to load for anyone on a slower internet connection, but I hope it will be worth the wait. The animation loads in a new browser window and will cycle continuously in real time once it has fully loaded:

http://www.coastalbeacons.com/SH_120404_anim/SH_120404_gale_animation.htm

I hope you'll enjoy seeing the animation if you have the time.

Gary

Gary,

That was spectacular! Only took about 5 seconds to load.

bobo

That poor light just takes a major beating every year! Wonder how hard that kind of wave abuse is on the structural integrity of the light?

Great sequence, Gary. Makes you appreciate how mean the lakes can be!

Absolutely marvelous, Gary!

Bob

Gary, I've got a question for you on these animations...

When you use the motor drive, do you set the exposure to automatic? Or do you set it manually?

It appears that frame-by-frame the exposure is changing somehwat. When the frame includes a big white wave, the exposure for the rest of the picture appears to be darker.

Just curious...

Gary...I'm glad it's you standing outside not me. Thanks for letting me enjoy your spectacular photography work from the warmth and comfort inside my home.

John, the camera is shooting at anywhere from 4 to 8 frames/sec when I photograph waves for an animation. In the conditions you're shooting in, typically 30+ mph winds, you have to have a shutter speed high enough to avoid blurring the image as the wind buffets the camera and lens. This was shot with a 300 mm f/4 lens on a Nikon D2H DSLR body. That gives you an effective focal length of 450 mm. For that sort of focal length, you need a shutter speed of about 1/1000th sec or higher to insure sharp images.

To get that, I generally set the camera in shutter priority of "S" mode with the shutter speed established at where you need it for the lens you're using. For the images in this sequence the camera was set for 1/1000th of a sec. The iso was set to 400 to give me an aperature when nothing was happening of f/8. During the course of the 22 frames shot in the sequence, the aperature varied from f/8 at the start to f/10 and back to f/8 by the end of it. The light level changes that you're seeing are the changes the camera's metering system is making from frame to frame to compensate for the billowing cloud of spray and the amount of light being reflected. This, obviously is a double edged sword -- you need the light to get the contrast, but at the same time, the exposure is changing so you get a fluctuation in the brightness from image to image. There you have it. I build the animations from that point directly after crop registering them, preferring not to Photoshop the images to try to make the light levels all look the same. After all, they weren't.

Hope this helps.

Hey Lorie, come on over some time in the late fall before the big pond freezes and you can see it for real... that's a whole lot more exciting that watching from your arm chair! If you hop the red-eye to Chicago and rent a car, you can be here for the show tomorrow morning... GALE FORCE WINDS AGAIN and 10+ foot waves! For eveyone else who has commented, thanks for your comments -- glad you enjoyed the show!

As always, Gary, AWESOME!