Having finally got the hang of my 10 stop filter (I’d been struggling to get a decent shot with it for months… due to operator error!), I decided that this morning, I would walk across to the north side of the island in the pre-dawn darkness and get some sunrise shots.
I’d checked the maps and knew which beach I was headed for.
So, off I set in complete darkness with just a handheld torch to guide me.
As I made my way gingerly along the jungle paths, I would see huge rats scurrying away through the spill of my torch light into the darkness.
They freaked me out.
Then, from their perches shrouded in darkness, hornbills would take flight mere centimeters above my head, scaring the bejesus out of me, as well as sending a torrent of raindrops down on me from the recently-shaken branches.
THAT freaked me out.
And then to top it all off, as I’m powering along, my torch revealed an odd collection of colours and shapes that brought me to a dead halt.
As best as I can determine from my googling, it was one of these.
That REALLY freaked me out.
I had to wait for about 30 seconds before he decided to vacate his position on the path and head off into the undergrowth.
I continued my journey up past the mud volcano we’d been at the day before, and found that once beyond that point, the track become decidedly less navigable.
I was now having to climb over fallen trees, trying to avoid the nasty velcro-like vegetation that wanted to rip my skin off, cross wooden bridges which were devoid of half of their planks… oh, and did I mention the bats that would pass mere millimeters from your head in the darkness?
Seriously, by the time I made it to the beach, I was determined that I was going to stay there until at least an hour after sun up so that I would at least be able to navigate back to the resort in daylight!
But as I was navigating along this path, it occurred to me (as one who has a pretty good sense of direction) that I was heading north-west when I knew I should have been going north-east by now.
I figure I just hadn’t reached the turn off (that I’d seen on the map) yet.
But lo and behold, next thing I know, I’m at a completely different beach to the one I’d been aiming for. Even though I didn’t have the map with me, I remembered enough of the layout to know where I was on the island. Somehow, I’d missed my turn off.
Anyway, as I stumbled out of the forest onto the beach, I noticed a couple of macaques bolt off the beach and back under cover of the trees.
The beach was lovely, just as one would expect of a remote beach in the equatorial parts of the planet…. except for one thing.
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Yep, every type of debris imaginable was littered along the beach.
I will admit I was disgusted to think that people would bother to get themselves to a spot like this, and then not care enough to take their crap with them.
It was only a few days later that a thought would come to me…. all the rubbish was high up on the beach, right near the tree line, and there was no rubbish at all closer to the water. Almost like it had been washed up on a massive king tide. And that made me wonder…. could this rubbish have been washed here in the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami? That would explain the quantity of rubbish. It would also explain why it was all washed so far up the beach, and why it formed a single line along the treeline.
That’s my theory, and I’m sticking with it. 🙂
So, having made the arduous trek here, it was time to make the most of it.
I set up the tripod and my 10 stop filter and starting making exposures.
And it was during the hour or so that I was on this beach that I came to the realisation (which I discussed in episode 228 of Shutters Inc) that my HiTech 10 stop filter is actually closer to an 11 stop filter, and that the three colour channels (RGB) expose at different rates when shooting through it. When you have an image correctly exposed for the blue channel (the channel which exposes the soonest), the green channel is about half a stop underexposed, and the red channel is a good 1.5-2 stops underexposed. As I experimented with more frames and this knowledge became revealed to me, I made a point of shooting a sequence of frames where I disregarded the TOTAL exposure and simply concentrated on getting a sequence of images where each of the individual colour channels was exposed correctly…. my thinking being that once home, I should be able to layer the three images together in Photoshop and take the individual correctly-exposed channels and composite them together into one image. That’s a technique I still have to master. Once this series of posts is published, I will get onto that project, and will write a post to accompany the ‘corrected’ image.
So despite the challenges I faced getting to the beach, it was in my opinion, a morning well spent.
I trekked back to the resort in daylight (much easier going!) and joined Cath and Max for breakfast.
We were supposed to be going kayaking this morning, but the winds had shifted to south-westerly which meant that our normally placid beachfront area was quite choppy and not particularly conducive to watersports of any kind.
Instead, we had a quiet morning to ourselves, with Cath enjoying both the hammocks and the great swing seat you can see in the last image in this set.
The afternoon saw most of the group (myself included) heading off on a long trek around the island (deja vu?) which resulted in us ending up at the same beach I’d been at this morning!
But I didn’t take the camera on this trek, as I knew that the paths we were going to take would be even rougher than what I’d tackled in the dark 8 hours earlier!
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