This is another first for me, kind of a follow-up of sorts to last week’s shot of a sunset at this very same location. Until this point in my life I had never taken a long-exposure picture of the moon rising over the ocean, and when this opportunity presented itself I was more than a little excited to take my little workhorse, the trusty ol’ Fuji X100F, out to the water’s edge and see what kinds of images I could capture. I had a few ideas in mind but, as a midwesterner who has only ever been to the ocean a few times in my life, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing or how to go about creating a good composition. I knew I wanted a long-exposure shot to make the wavy surface smooth, and I also wanted to capture the rising celestial body in the distance, but beyond that I wasn’t quite sure what exactly I was going for.
The thing I realized over the course of our time at the beach, which probably seems obvious to more seasoned photographers who take these kinds of images, is that it really helps to orient the viewer if there is something familiar for them to latch on to. Not necessarily a focal point per se, but more of a reference point so people looking at the image have a sense of time, place, scale, or other such defining characteristic. As I took pictures while the moon rose in the distance it occurred to me that if I had few seashells in the foreground I could not only use them to create that sense of context but balance out the color as well. I found a couple shells on the sand (it wasn’t hard, which was one of those things that kind of surprised me but is probably no big deal to people who spend any amount of time on the coast) and moved them in front of my camera, which was positioned atop my nearly completely-collapsed travel tripod. To get this image I focused on the large orange shell, set the aperture to f/13, the ISO to 200, and the shutter to 20 seconds. The waves crashed, the wind whispered, the shells stayed in place, and when it was done I had one of the most incredible images I have ever taken.
Sure there are things I could have done differently, like use a wide-angle lens to get even more of the seashore in the shot, or somehow placed my camera lower on the ground, but I can confidently say that never in my life had I taken a picture quite like this and even now it still kind of surprises me. The icing on the cake, the pièce de résistance if you will, is the reflection of the moon shimmering on the surface of the waters. It adds a sense of calm to the composition, and I consider myself immensely fortunate to have been able to be at this place, in this time, to create this composition.
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