Here’s a setup on Star Island (off the Portsmouth, NH coast), from earlier this afternoon:
5x7 camera with 210mm lens…bottom of the image skirting just below those light colored rocky “shelves” on the right, with just a bit of the “shelving” included, up to just above the horizon, and over to about one third in from the left.
I was hoping for a short(ish) time exposure of waves crashing over the “barrier rocks” just to the left and over into the trough…with the lighting upon my arrival being medium bright backlit fog - which I really enjoy for setups like these.
At any rate…once I got the composition, focus, etc. dialed in, with film holder inserted and light measured, with everything set - the waves just died. So I waited….
When the next set of large waves arrived…I removed the dark slide just in time for the sun to blast through the haze, at which point I re-inserted the dark slide and waited for a bit longer.
When the sun was finally blocked by the next installment of haze…I removed the dark slide once more - only to notice that a really slow lobster boat had appeared on the left horizon…and while the light and waves were each spectacular during this interval - the end of the lobster boat then coincided with the end of the waves.
By this time the tide had receded enough that the intervals of strong surf covering the rocks had lessened significantly.
At this point the waves had become very intermittent, and the light was quite variable - so I did a “hail Mary” series of exposures (totaling about thirty seconds) on one frame of film…having no idea if it would actually work.
Then the sun arrived once more…so I rolled my dark cloth up as a back rest and lay down on the rocks for awhile.
After a bit I’d noticed that the sun had disappeared again - at which point I had a sudden urge to urinate…and so I hopped down a few rocks to a little alcove and peed.
At about the time I was zipping up my fly…I suddenly heard/felt a rumble of surf and got to my camera just in time to reach for another film holder. With the waves and light suddenly cooperating…I could sense that everything had finally come together. But at that point I discovered that I’d already used my last frame of film. Then it started to rain….
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