Cappuccino Surf

[AlanLichty]

I made a pilgrimage to Cape Perpetua yesterday and decided to try an experiment by shooting with my camera set for high speed shots like I would use for birds in flight to see what kinds of details I could pull out of high surf conditions with heavy sea foam as the waves pounded into Cook's Chasm. I wasn't disappointed in the results. When the waves break into the basalt there is a lot going on with the textures of the foaming seas that happen too quickly for us to see but at 1/2000s things get interesting.

This shot shows a small wavelet of foam making its own little wave on top of the incoming surge of water and reminded me of a wave breaking in the foam atop a cappuccino with some pretty strange looking textures.

C&C always welcome.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Nice and frothy and I am now craving a cup of coffee

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice and frothy and I am now craving a cup of coffee

Thanks Jameel - I was enjoying a cappuccino while I was posting this one

 

[Kurt Harrigan]

That's an amazing amount of detail Were you able to get any of just the wave tops without the background?

 

[Roger Bailey]

Water sculpture, always changing, looks like 2 dragons in the wave, a very nice photo!

 

[AlanLichty]

That's an amazing amount of detail Were you able to get any of just the wave tops without the background?

Thanks Kurt - Not easy to get a lot of good viewpoints for this without getting clobbered by the spray. I was never able to discern this type of wavelet structure while it was zooming past. I was shooting at 30fps to get this.

 

[AlanLichty]

Water sculpture, always changing, looks like 2 dragons in the wave, a very nice photo!

Thanks Roger - no two swells were even vaguely lose to doing the same thing as they entered the chasm inlet but the sheer variety of shapes that came out of yesterday's session were quite amazing.

 

[Trent Watts]

I really like this Alan. The small details, textures and obvious crazy motion are all evident. You would loose all that in a soft shot.

 

[AlanLichty]

I really like this Alan. The small details, textures and obvious crazy motion are all evident. You would loose all that in a soft shot.

Thanks Trent - I just checked and this was shot at 1/3200s. For as many thousands of shot I have taken out along the coast I have never tried shooting that fast before. I have watched the water go shooting past here many times but have never seen details like this before - it's not a set of details you can really see with your naked eyes.

I need to try things like this more often.

 

[JimFox]

A sculpture is a great way to describe this. This one is magic!

 

[AlanLichty]

A sculpture is a great way to describe this. This one is magic!

Thanks Jim - I was panning waves shooting 30fps at either 1/2000s or 1/3200s so I have a 1000+ shot pile of images to wade through and no 2 frames are the same. Each panning sequence is about a second or so long and contains 40 images since it is prerecording some when you fully push the shutter. This little wavelet didn't make it into the 2 second mark and this frame had the best details. The window of opportunity to catch this scene is 1/30s.

 

[Peter Michal]

Wonderful, like from a fairy tale, Alan! I would call it a "dragon race" (from right to left).. I can clearly see several dragon heads.
Peter

 

[AlanLichty]

Wonderful, like from a fairy tale, Alan! I would call it a "dragon race" (from right to left).. I can clearly see several dragon heads.
Peter

Thanks Peter - it is pretty easy to see the dragon heads in these shapes. I can't unsee them now that you pointed them out