Studying video clips for seascape

Here is an easy way to study wave action in your studio. If you are trying to paint seascape, I suggest you try capturing some little clips of wave action with your digital camera. I have wanted to do this for years, but in the olden days that meant taking a video camera down into the surf and the resulting product was clunky and hard to replay a short portion in an endless loop. Tape was clumsy, but the little clips my digital camera shoots, when viewed on my computer are easy to make, and easy to cycle through their action. I can get a real look at something that used to go by so quickly I felt that I had never really seen it.

Still photos are OK, but this is much better. If you keep clicking behind the moving counter on the clips you can run the wave again and again

I have been running little videos like these over and over. My simple Windows picture viewer will allow me to run part of a clip repeatedly so I can analyze the wave carefully. I shot this with a cheap little Sony Cybershot camera that my wife got a deal on because it was an unfortunate biological pink.

I like how low tech this all is, the camera cost less than a weekend of binge drinking and my simple Toshiba laptop cost me less than an OUI. The viewer I am using came free with the operating system and I didn't have to read a manual to figure it out. I don't read manuals.

The wave breaks into the picture and its back is rising up as the force carries it forward, under all of that foam, unseen, the back of the wave passes the front wall and the whole thing collapses like a lead trapdoor. That crushes all of the foam beneath it and smashes the front of the breaker forward against the rocks. This video shows well the tremendous weight of all that water.In painting seascape getting that power and weight is essential.

Below is another one, but this time I got wet. Frederick Waugh would have been very jealous of this setup. The wave below looks like a Waugh painting in motion.