Running... Again?

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  If you know me you know there was a time about 10 years ago or so where I was running. A lot. At least 5 days a week and at least 5 miles a run. I wasn’t training, I wasn’t preparing for a race or a marathon. I just found myself enjoying the time spent running. I wasn’t obsessed with numbers, but I kept track of them all and liked seeing improvements in time and distances. It was good physical health and mental health. Then I tweaked my knee. Not bad enough that I couldn’t walk on it, just a tweak that told me I needed to back off of running for a little bit. So I decided on 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks I aborted a run very early as the pain was still there. 2 weeks became 3, became a month, became 5 years. 

Week 46 GPlus Project 52 The Vanishing Point

Week 46: Vanishing Point
Under the boardwalk
The theme for this week was vanishing point and I was really excited to do this for a couple reasons. In Evernote I keep a notebook of types of shots that I want to do eventually and this week I was able to cross one of those things off my list. I've always wanted to do an under the pier shot around sunset as I've seen a lot of photographers I follow online do, and with the theme and after the weather I had my chance. It took me two days to get a number of useable shots, but it was well worth it.

It's a tricky shot as there is only so much time you can take this shot. Start too early and the area outside of the pier is far too bright. Get there too late and it's just too dark to make an interesting shot. Then there's the ever rising tide to keep an eye on. On my first day I was forced back to higher rocks roughly ten feet behind where I took this shot due to the tide. With this shot I was keeping one eye on the light and the other on the water line. I didn't have a problem with getting a little wet, but I wasn't looking forward to scrambling over rocks and through water to get out from under the pier.

In photographic details there was a lot of thought put in before even shooting. I wanted to be able to capture the water as a moving object or at least not freeze in mid-motion so I decided to you my neutral density filter which gives a really nice evening out on the water. Then there was the obstacle of how to capture both the area outside of the pier which so much brighter area and the area under the pier which is much darker. This was a made for HDR shot. Since this was going to be an HDR shot, with my neutral density filter on, this meant I had to use a tripod. On the first day of shooting I took my smaller travel tripod, and honestly of the nearly 40 shots I took on it I had maybe ten that were useable. The problem was the smaller tripod was just a lot flimsier, especially at the head. Day two saw me bring my much larger tripod but was as stable as the rocks it was standing on.

A good sign of what I shot is that on both days I hurried home and quickly loaded the photos on to Aperture to get to work on them. I have two or three other shots that turned out really well, but I really liked this one the best, and I hope you like it too.


You can view this, and the rest of my Project 52 photos here.

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