I had another of a bummer sunrise photo failure today. I got up early enough to get to the ocean, drove the whole way there, it was 30 degrees out so I was wearing a winter jacket, no clouds to be seen the whole 40 minutes I was driving, I got to the beach and…
One band of clouds blocking the horizon. Clear skies everywhere else. Sunrise failure. Also, the tide was so far in that there was no beach. I had about a five foot wide area between the water line and the sea wall at the side of the road. It greatly reduced the potential photos, seriously.
I got a few nice pics, just nothing with the sun poking it’s big round head out of the water which is the whole point of these visits. I did eventually finish this month’s installment of the Frugal Film Project though. I just packaged up four rolls of film to ship off to the lab. That’s a good thing at least, even if the sunrise photos are duds.
I mean, could those clouds suck any more?
I might try again next Sunday. It will be Halloween after all.
I shipped seven rolls of film to the darkroom in California on Monday afternoon and I got the scans back on Friday morning! Talk about your epic turn around time!
Finally! The sky was clear at sunrise on a weekend. I took four, count ’em four, cameras out with me. My digital, Nikon Z5, my two 35mm, Dad’s Pentax K1000 and my Nikon FG-20, and my new/ebay medium format experiment, Lomo Lubitel 166 Universal.
The 35mm cameras each had a roll already started. My goal was to finish them off. The Lubitel… what the hell, Robert. I’ve had the camera for months and had not completed even a single test roll. I had already messed up the first roll by over advancing it once and blowing a shot, and then flashing the film when the camera back popped open on its own once. My goal was to finish that roll and then put a second roll through and hope that something worked on one of them enough to let me know if the camera actually works or not. Besides all of that film fun, I just wanted to take a bunch of pics with my Z5 because it’s super fun.
I completed all of those goals. I now have four rolls of film to develop. I’ll place an order today and ship them out tomorrow. The two 120 rolls were fucked up even more than I already knew. I didn’t have any trouble with the second one… or so I thought. The camera can be setup to shoot in 6×6 format or in 4.5×6. I was using the 4.5×6 numbers for advancing the film after each (well… most… there are going to be a bunch of double exposures because I am too stupid to operate a manual camera, I guess) but upon further review, the camera is clearly set up to shoot a square format… so every single shot is going to overlap. Moron.
Anyway… here are a bunch of digital pics.
Hampton Beach, NH at sunrise!
These are from a spot in North Hampton, NH, just a little north of Hampton Beach.
These are from a little spot on route 1A just south of Hampton Beach. I don’t know if it is in Seabrook or in the town of Hampton Beach, but you can see the Seabrook nuclear power plant from here so… kaboom.
After that spot I drove home, but didn’t go home. I went to the Spicket Falls Dam in downtown Methuen. We’ve had massive rains over the last week so the river was roaring.
At this point I still had a few shots left in two of the film cameras so I went over to Greycourt Park where I got my brand new sneakers soaking wet by walking around in the grass. It was nice.
What is that baseball doing there? Who left that behind?
And there you have it. Finally, a photography kinda morning. You would think this would hold me over for a little while at least, but nope. I want to go out again right now. Right Freakin’ Now.
I drove North from Hampton Beach looking for a place to pull off that had a nice view. There were a bunch of potential spots, but they all had no parking signs. This spot had a no parking sign too but I was a total rebel and pulled over anyway. If you know this area, you’ll recognize the spot.
I stopped in three places this morning. I will post each stop separately, though almost all of the pictures I took were at this first spot.
Stop number one was the same spot as last week’s cloudy sunrise failure. Hampton Beach. Just a smidge north of the main beach area. Last week the tide was out and the clouds were in. This week the tide was in and the clouds were nowhere to be seen. I got there about 10 minutes before the sun came up. I only had a short stretch of very rocky beach between me and the sea wall. It was enough.
This next photo is a very happy accident. I had put my digital camera (Nikon Z5) down to take some pre-sunrise film pics (Dad’s Pentax K1000). It was getting very close to sunrise time so I switched back to digital and just put it up to my eye and focused on the horizon. I was looking due East (totally by accident) at the exact moment the sun broke the water. Like, the exact moment. I saw it through the view finder. I did not see a green flash though.
This photo is from about one heartbeat after the sunrise started. Can you see the little guy off in the distance?
This photo demonstrates my one screw up in a very positive way. When I am at home taking pictures of the cats I keep the ISO on my Z5 pretty high. 1600, usually. When I go outside I lower the ISO to 100 or 200, depending on how much light there is. I just like the way things look when the ISO is way low. Today… I forgot to lower it. All of these are at ISO 1600, which means the camera takes in more light (ISO is supposed to be like film speed, the higher the number the more light) which meant I could use a way faster shutter speed, which means the birds who randomly photo bombed me are not blurry at all.
I know I already posted this next photo, but it is my favorite of the day by so many hundreds of miles that I am posting it again.
And there we have it. The first of three posts from this morning’s photo fun. I am very pleased with how these came out, even if the ISO is way too high. The next post will be from the side of the road (route 1A) a few miles north of this spot. The second post is from a few miles south at a little beach spot in Seabrook, across the water from the nuclear power plant and where there is a little marina or something with lots of boats tied up for the night.
I don’t know if I will be able to wake up at 4:00am in order to get there in time, but if I do I’ll have a digital camera and a film camera and it will be cool.
I thought this morning was going to be a bust. I got up to Hampton Beach in plenty of time to catch the sunrise, but there were clouds covering the horizon. Lots of them. I thought I had wasted a morning. I didn’t though. Gravitational lensing and all that? Could be.
I took a few shots before the appointed sunrise time, just because I was there and the ocean was there and we were there together and why not, right?
The waves were super wimpy, but the sky was just spectacular. I set up the tripod and put the digital camera on it for some long exposures. I’m not sure why, but none of them came out. I used shutter priority and set the time to 30 seconds. I didn’t try anything shorter than that so it’s my fault, but at least I can blame the… shit… I forgot to drop the ISO down to 100. I keep it set at 800 when I am at home. Okay. I can’t blame shutter priority, it was all my fault. Sorry about that, folks.
Anyway, I took out the ebay Nikon with Dad’s zoom lens and I was putzing around with that when suddenly I noticed the freakin’ sun was visible, popping out of the water. I guess I didn’t waste the morning after all!
Success! Two sunrise shoots in less than one week. I think I am set for sunrise at the ocean pics for a while then. Excellent.
One thing that’s fun at this spot on Hampton Beach is catching the sun reflecting off the windows across the street. It was less impressive than other visits but it was okay. I was missing my old zoom lens at this point, but I had a zoom on the film camera so I may get a good view when I get the film developed at some point in the vastly distant future.
I took a bunch of sun and water shots with the film camera. I expect they will all suck, mostly because the light meter on the Nikon FG-20 is a bitch to read. Manually focusing with that camera is also a bitch, but everything I was looking at was at infinity so that made it easier. Hopefully everything will come out okay, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I had planned to make a second stop on this morning’s photography adventure. I was going to go to downtown Lowell and walk around with one of the film cameras. Unfortunately for my plans my bladder was kinda full. I changed plans to stop at a spot in Andover where you can get up close to a railroad track, but I needed to change from route 495 South to route 93 South and I accidentally got on route 93 North, which is the way to get home. I was kind of on autopilot because I was listening to the live tracks on the deluxe edition of Rush Permanent Waves because today is Geddy Lee’s birthday and I guess I just distracted myself.
I decided I would go home, pee, and then go out for some car music. When I got home, Jen suggested I go back to bed because it was only 6:30am or so and I was going to need a nap at some point, so I went back to bed for a couple of hours and then did car music.
