Tetiaroa Seascapes, 2015

In mid-December 2015, Marisa and I visited the small atoll, Tetiaroa, in French Polynesia. The small island can be circumnavigated on foot on the sandy beach in less than an hour. It is the home of the newly built resort, The Brando. True to the name, the atoll was purchased by Marlon Brando in 1966-1967; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetiaroa.

The Brando offers a small number of on-the-beach cottages, bicycles to get around the island, wonderful food, and a great place to photograph the ocean after sunset. These time exposures were taken with a Hasselblad H5D-50c, fitted with a Hasselblad 50-110mm zoom, and a Tiffen Neutral Density 1.2 Filter. The softness of the images comes from long exposures as water and clouds continue to move during the exposure -- the only really sharp thing in the images is the horizon line.

The Hasselblad H5D-50c is not an ordinary digital camera: rather than the once-conventional CCD sensor, the H5D captures images on a CMOS sensor allowing exposures up to 12 minutes with an excellent signal to noise ratio. By comparison, the Hasselblad H4D-60 (e.g., used for my Graffiti Mash-Ups) is limited to 32-seconds maximum exposure and cannot capture images that are the same as those seen here. The neutral density filter adds four stops to the exposure, allowing the shutter to be open for 16 times as long, e.g., eight minutes versus 30 seconds.

This series of Seascapes extends my collection of Seascapes which were done from 2008 to 2011 on color transparency film. I owe big thanks to Hasselblad for the H5D with the CMOS sensor. It is much easier to work with original digital files as compared to shooting on transparency film, guessing at long exposures in fading light after sunset, and waiting days to see the result as 4x5 inch transparencies. And that is just the beginning with color transparencies! Each transparency in the earlier series had to be scanned at high resolution, and each file had to be laboriously cleaned up to remove dust and scratches before even thinking about a finished image.

Both The Brando and Tetiaroa are highly recommended!