A Wider view of Windansea Beach 2/14/09
After having some fun at Windansea Beach last week and from the positive feedback I received on the results, I decided to revisit the same place on Saturday. This time, I brought the rental 11-16mm to see how well it worked for landscapes.
Luckily, this lens uses the same size filters as my main lens, so I can use my ND/POL combo. Light falloff is expected in this focal length range, but it doesn't turn into total vignetting (chopped corners due to seeing the edges of the filters), which is a big plus. That would have been enough reason to decide to not buy it.
The double shadows on the left are a result of the differing heights of the bare sand and the surface of the water. It's easy to eliminate the effect using a shorter exposure time, but I kinda like to see it.
The tide was much higher this time, so I couldn't get down on the beach as much as I wanted to, so the shots are from the upper level of rocks, right when you get down the stairs.
Most of the above shots were 30 seconds or so, using my trusty 10-stop ND filter. I haven't really explored my 6-stop ND filter much, but I did use it with the polarizer to see how it would change the look of the water. So instead of 30 second exposures, I could use 0.5- 4 second exposures. This gave a dramatically different look to the water.
That 3 second exposure has blurry water, but still shows details of where the waves are. There's more movement and energy in the water, since it hasn't had time to blur out to cotton candy. For a more even comparison:
30 seconds:
3 seconds:
The faint white blur above the rock in the back is a wave crashing against it. I played around with getting an interesting wave crash too, at 1 second:
The surf shack makes a nice subject too. 
I never bought into the photographic rule that you shouldn't use a polarizer on a wide angle lens, but I can see that it's more important at try to least make the sky look natural and not just max out the effect, as above. The two-tone look isn't so great. I'm kicking myself for not just taking a few steps to the left, than I'd have a sky that responded evenly to a polarizer, I think.
"So what did you do at the beach today, honey?"
"Oh nothing, just hung out."
Luckily, this lens uses the same size filters as my main lens, so I can use my ND/POL combo. Light falloff is expected in this focal length range, but it doesn't turn into total vignetting (chopped corners due to seeing the edges of the filters), which is a big plus. That would have been enough reason to decide to not buy it.
The double shadows on the left are a result of the differing heights of the bare sand and the surface of the water. It's easy to eliminate the effect using a shorter exposure time, but I kinda like to see it.
The tide was much higher this time, so I couldn't get down on the beach as much as I wanted to, so the shots are from the upper level of rocks, right when you get down the stairs.
Most of the above shots were 30 seconds or so, using my trusty 10-stop ND filter. I haven't really explored my 6-stop ND filter much, but I did use it with the polarizer to see how it would change the look of the water. So instead of 30 second exposures, I could use 0.5- 4 second exposures. This gave a dramatically different look to the water.
That 3 second exposure has blurry water, but still shows details of where the waves are. There's more movement and energy in the water, since it hasn't had time to blur out to cotton candy. For a more even comparison:
30 seconds:
3 seconds:
The faint white blur above the rock in the back is a wave crashing against it. I played around with getting an interesting wave crash too, at 1 second:
The surf shack makes a nice subject too.
I never bought into the photographic rule that you shouldn't use a polarizer on a wide angle lens, but I can see that it's more important at try to least make the sky look natural and not just max out the effect, as above. The two-tone look isn't so great. I'm kicking myself for not just taking a few steps to the left, than I'd have a sky that responded evenly to a polarizer, I think.
"So what did you do at the beach today, honey?"
"Oh nothing, just hung out."
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