Beaufort Force Zero: A Photoessay

By Vladimir Brezina

Winds and waves are all very well , but some of the most magic moments in a kayak on the open sea come when the wind dies down completely and the calm sea joins with the sky…

There is nowhere where the sea ends and the sky begins

The kayaker floats in space

unless another floating object breaks the spell

The formless space can make one dizzy

until sudden ripples show where the two fluids meet

Reflections are more real than reality

(These photos were taken in Western Long Island Sound.  More photos are here.)

13 responses to “Beaufort Force Zero: A Photoessay

  1. fabulous, beautiful fotos,!!!

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  2. Wow way cool photos !! Dizzying for sure.

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  3. Cool shots…are these straight out of the camera or did you do any photoshopping? Also…how did you do the facebook/twitter login?

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    • They are almost, but not quite, straight out of the camera…

      I routinely do two things:

      (1) Increase the saturation slightly (especially for photos from my other camera, which generates RAW images) to get the photos to look more like the “way it really was” :-) But this is tricky, especially as photos that look flat on one of my monitors look garish on another. (This camera-doesn’t-lie thing has more than a few problems nowadays…)

      (2) Crop the images as necessary, especially those shot from a kayak. On land, I try to frame the shot perfectly in the good old-fashioned way, but that’s not really productive in a bouncing kayak. So I take a much wider field of view and then crop. That’s where you can never have too many megapixels!

      But these particular photos had minimal intervention, as I wanted a large field of view and relatively subdued colors, the way they really were…

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    • Sorry, forgot to answer your question about Facebook/Twitter!

      We are not on Twitter at the moment. But WordPress has a nice automatic publicize feature whereby any post in WordPress appears automatically on Facebook (and other services if desired, including Twitter).

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  4. Oh. How. I. Love. Days. Like. That. Aaaah.

    thank you thank you thank you. Tenth anniversary has my nerves a-jangle…just looking at these pictures gave me a moment of calm.

    I think I should go for a solo paddle tomorrow.

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  5. PS – Tom Hart…I bet no photoshop here. This is exactly what it looks like when you are out in your kayak on a calm calm calm day.

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  6. Thanks, everybody!! Great encouragement, especially after reading the other day about how everybody nowadays finds landscape photography boring and only people shots count!

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  7. I was asking about the twitter/facebook/wordpress login below the comments….great not to have to remember a special login for your site but you can still require all users login (which i would assume helps in comment spam)….On photoshopping, it sounds like you do less then I usually do. Trying to get what you actually see (which is often far from what the camera sees) is admirable. Debatable as to whether it is even manipulating.

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  8. Pingback: Reflections | Wind Against Current

Comments are most welcome!