House of Sand and Fog

I spent an hour and a half at the Oceanside pier yesterday and made a little time-lapse video of the pier, the sand, the water and the sky. I used my new 10.5mm fisheye lens to capture the action. The only problem with this is that everything becomes much smaller than they normally appear.

Another minor problem with this is that the video took in a lot of action that is hard to see all at once.

There are the people going up and down the pier. There's really not much you get to see there...just people moving back and forth.

The clouds turned out pretty well. The fisheye lens captured their movement across a very wide field and it kind of makes them look like they're swirling around the center of the view. That's fun.

The waves turned out OK. With six seconds between shots there isn't a lot of continuity there.

There aren't a lot of people on the beach. It was cool, cloudy and windy. There are joggers. There are a couple of people poking around the rocks at the lower right and around the pier's legs. I think they were harvesting mussels or something. And there's an occasional child who has to dig in the sand.

About halfway through, a couple with their baby park their stroller in the middle of the view and stay there till the end of the video. I kept hoping they'd leave because I thought I had taken enough pictures to get a idea of what this sort of scene would look like. But I didn't want to just cut it off while they were still a prominent feature of the scene. They were taking turns with a skimboard. The father never got it to glide. Once he stepped on it it would dig into the sand and stop. The mother had a little better luck. Kind of. She'd glide a little way then fall into the water. At least she got the board to do some gliding with her on it.

They finally packed up and left. Once they got out of sight I stopped and packed up. It was cold and windy and I had had enough.

I wanted to use the same exposure for all of the shots. Since the camera was going to point toward the sun and the clouds would hide and expose the sun, I didn't wan to use any of the automatic settings. That would make the pictures get dark when the sun was exposed and it would get too light when the sun went behind thick clouds. So I took a shot in an automatic mode with the camera pointing away from the sun and used the exposure it ended up with for the video.

Here is the video made from 1/800^th second exposures at f/14. The shots were taken every six seconds from 10:40 till 12:06. They're played at a rate of 10 frames per second. That lets you see each minute of real time pass each second.



I'm looking forward to doing this when the weather is nice and with an extreme tide. Crowds and rising water will be a good combination.

Paper Moon

I got a new piece of photographic equipment: a 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens! Super-duper wide angle...180° view from corner to corner! It's not a zoom lens. Nikon makes a 10-24mm zoom but I wanted the faster lens for nighttime movie-making. And one of the lenses that came with the camera includes half of that range anyway.

Since it has such a wide view I thought it would be a good lens for shooting the sky. It can see a lot of the sky and can include much of the ground at the same time! So last night I put it to work.

Jerry and I went to my usual astronomy viewpoint and shot the rising of the just-past-full moon. We got set up and started shooting at 7:15. The moon made its first appearance at 7:40. It had risen a couple of minutes before that but had to rise above a bit of a hill.

I had set the exposure to get nice images of the stars against the mostly black sky. I hadn't taken pictures of the sky with a full moon so I didn't know if that exposure would be completely washed out or look nice. I couldn't tell while while pictures were being taken...I had turned off the image review to save the battery for picture taking. So after an hour and a half I decided that this was just an experiment and quit. If the moonlit portion was overexposed I didn't want to be depressed after sitting around for any longer.

It turns out that the exposure for the dark sky was great for the moonlit scene. There are still stars visible and the ground is nicely lit.

One of these days I'm going to make an all-night movie.

I shot 16 seconds long exposures with the ISO sensitivity set to 3200 and used the lens's widest aperture. There is one second between exposures.



Your videographer makes an occasional appearance. The spot is a popular place for skywatching and probably lovers' laning. So every now and then a car comes by and I stand next to the camera to keep the headlights from shining on the camera and making lens flares. But this is a wide angle lens so I got in the picture when that happened. And at times you can see Jerry or me wandering down the road.

Here's a full-sized picture I took before shooting the movie. The town on the horizon on the left is Borrego Springs. The lights in the bottom left corner are cars on Banner Grade and San Felipe Road. That part of the scene is fun to watch in the video. Of course, Orion is prominent up there in the sky.

I kept saying "I wish I were home in Kansas!" "I wish I would see meteors!" I got my wish. Once. It's on the right side of this picture below Orion.

I love my new lens!