Sea and Sky

This is an image from my recent trip to Olympic National Park in Washington state. This particular spot along Ruby Beach - which I learned of during the photo workshop I was doing there - was one of my favorites from the trip. It's found right at the mouth of a small cave-like structure looking out into the open ocean. Depending on the tide level and the roughness of the water, you can get anything from a gentle stream of water that stops just short of the cave, to a strong surge of angry ocean violently funneled through a narrow opening in the rocks, which can fill a good portion of the cave (and engulf whatever camera equipment you have inside it - not to mention the photographer). You can see why I was so drawn to this place!

After the workshop had finished, I returned on my own to this beautiful location so I could really take my time and let my creative juices flow. It turns out that, due to my poor timing with the tides, I didn't have all that much time before water filled the cave to the point where both me and my gear were in serious jeopardy and had to back out. However, before it came to this, I managed to squeeze off a few shots (in between wiping big drops of salt water off the front of my lens) to produce the image shown here.

BTW, although I did manage to escape the highly camera unfriendly salt water at this moment, it was less than half-an-hour later, at this exact location, that the "lens incident" occurred (most of you who follow my posts know what I'm talking about)

For those interested in how the image was made, I took two pictures of the same scene (same composition), one properly exposing the sky, the other properly exposing the rocks and water. These two images were then manually blended in post-processing to achieve an image with a suitable amount of dynamic range. The streaking of the water was achieved using a slightly long shutter speed (about 1 second, if memory serves) to record the movement of the water and give the image a more dynamic feel (which is certainly what I felt at the time!).
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