Description — This is Destruction Island, which is several miles off the Washington coast. It was photographed from the Ruby Beach overlook on the coast in November 2005.
Camera Nerd Info — Linhof Super Technika V 4×5 view camera, Nikkor-M 300mm f/9 lens, exposure 4s @ f/64, no movements, cropped image.
Commentary — To me this image presents a feeling of unease. The fog-enshrouded island in the distance is mysterious and forbidding; the long exposure smoothed out the water but left enough detail to make a viewer think that there is something swirling just beneath the surface, etc.
The photo is severely cropped; even so I can make a 16×20 inch print at 300 dpi of the cropped image. Here is the full image plus the film frame. You can see the island clearly only in a very large print:
Not long before I took this photo I read that a good rule of thumb for shooting sunsets with a manual camera is to meter the brightest part of the sky then open the lens aperture one stop from that reading. Here instead of opening from f/64 to f/32 I lengthened my shutter duration from two seconds to four seconds, which had the same effect on exposure. This worked okay. I’m not sure why I used f/64 aperture; perhaps I was trying to ensure depth of field. The Nikkor 300mm lens was the longest view camera lens I had at the time.
ML