This morning I drove to Belmar, NJ which has been one of my spots that I’ve been waiting for an opportunity with a sunrise. Belmar, NJ is a beachtown in New Jersey that has a pier which I was waiting until good weather and a good angle on the sunrise for shooting. Today the sunrise was at 716 AM and the angle was slightly off from the pier so I could get both in the shot. I got there about 645 AM and started shooting with my 28 mm lens at 5 second intervals. I was using manual exposure at f/13 and ISO 200 with the first shot at a 3 second shutter speed.
Everything was going well however I realized too late that I set up my tripod close to the water! I quickly checked the tide area when I got there and thought the tide was pretty far up since most of the pier was underwater. But about 20 minutes through I checked the high tide and it was 920 AM which meant it was going to come up closer and closer to my camera. Eventually it did! And I had to move about 10 feet back to restart my timelapse since I can’t have waves crashing on my camera! Luckily it happened right as the sun was starting to peak out so I could start a new timelapse with the sun just rising above the horizon.
I quickly set my camera to new settings at 3 second intervals with ISO 100 and f/18 with the first shot at 0.4 second shutter speed. Looking at the two videos, I like the second one better because of the time interval (3 seconds). I think shooting the ocean up-close with longer intervals creates a lot of quick movement in the waves.
I will definitely be heading back to this location, I really like the composition of the shot but next time I will look up the tides!
Still good practice for my trip to the Bahamas next week!!