House of Sand and Fog, Part II

Yesterday, we experienced a "King tide" here on the west coast. This is a very high tide followed by a rather low tide. (The east coast probably had theirs as well but I wasn't there.) I had a vacation day I needed to use. The weather forecast said that rain was going to move in late Friday afternoon. Low tide was going to happen in mid-afternoon so chances were good that I could record the full range of this extreme tide.

I got up at my usual time and had a breakfast of a toasted bagel. I didn't have my usual bowl of cereal and mug of orange juice and I skipped my morning shots of espresso. There were going to be six and a half hours between high tide and low tide and there was going to be no opportunity to step away from the camera to answer the call of nature. I had to avoid liquids!

I packed up my camera and intervalometer. I got a train ticket and headed over to the same spot I recorded my previous beach scene.

I got everything set up. The camera was pointing in the same direction as before with my wonderful new fisheye lens. I set up the intervalometer, plugged it into the camera and turned it on. Nothing.

Its batteries had run out.

But I was prepared! I had spares with me and installed them and fired up the intervalometer. Pictures started being taken!

I set up the camera in aperture priority mode. I didn't want to use fully automatic mode since that might change the aperture setting and change the depth of field. That really isn't much of an issue with a fisheye lens since its depth of field is very deep even with a wide aperture. I wanted the camera to adjust to changes in light level with the thinning and thickening of the clouds. I hadn't anticipated the complete clearing of the clouds.

When the clouds cleared, I was afraid that the exposure would be set too low when the sun was in the frame so I changed the exposure to manual and used the exposure setting the last automatic exposure. That way there was no abrupt change in the exposure and it wouldn't change as the sun made its appearance.

But then thick clouds moved back in and I realized that the exposure was now much too low and I changed back to the automatic aperture priority setting. At that point there is an abrupt change and things go from too dark to just right.

I seem to have accomplished all these tweaks to the exposure settings without moving the camera!

Then it got very cold and windy and the rain moved in. I had to quit. The last few frames of the video have water drops showing.

Low tide was 45 minutes after I closed up shop. It was going to drop less than another foot. I captured more than six and a half feet of the falling tide.

I started taking pictures at 8:16am, Friday, February 18, 2011. High tide was at 8:54 at 6.45 feet. I quit at 2:25pm. Low tide was at 3:25pm at -1.18 feet.

This is the graph of the tide level for the day. The "+" is when I grabbed the image.

What we have here are images taken at 12 second intervals. They're played back at 30 frames per second. Every second of the video is six minutes of real time.

Remember, this is in HD but I don't embed it as HD since that doesn't fit in the window as laid out by Blogger. Besides, some people have DSL and you know that sort of connection takes forever to load YouTube videos in low res. So I leave it up to you to select HD if you want to see it in its greatest glory. Well, the greatest YouTube offers. The original on my Mac is much, much nicer!

I don't know why the music doesn't play for me unless it's in full screen mode. I wonder if it plays for you.


When I got home I wasn't desperate to use the bathroom. If the weather had held out I would have been able to hold out myself!