Ebb and flow at Trawmore

The Tide at Trawmore from John Smyth on Vimeo.

The western tip of Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, is a very large and flat sand dune covered in grass. Near the airstrip, the dune has been eroded so that the tide floods in twice a day, creating a shallow saltwater lake. Naturally, it also drains away twice a day, leaving a very large beach (Trawmore is the phoenetic spelling of Trá [Gaelic word for beach] Mór [Gaelic word for big]). I stayed in a great B&B near the airstrip on Friday night [it’s called Ard Einne], and the view above was what I could see out of the bedroom window. So, before I went out for dinner, I put my camera on a tripod, with the lens poking out of the window, and set it to take a picture every 3 minutes.

What does it look like at low tide ? The panorama above was taken at sunrise last Saturday – it was created by joining together 7 wideangle pictures in Photoshop. The big version looks much better, though. In the panorama, the gap in the middle of the picture (where you can see the sea) is the channel where the sea flows in and out.

Technical info :

To create the video, I loaded the sequence of pictures into Adobe Lightroom. The original images had a more square aspect- the upper part of the image included part of the window frame and the lower part of the picture included more of the yard in front of the guesthouse. Lightroom is essentially a workflow tool so I was able to edit the first image in the sequence (just cropped it) and then applied that crop to all of the other pictures in the sequence. I exported all of the pictures at a reduced size, and then used Windows Movie Maker to create the video. The advantage of Movie Maker is that it is very simple to use and, as long as you don’t want to create anything too fancy, it doesn’t take too long to create the finished video. ‘Proper’ video uses 24 frames per second which would have given me only  about three and a half seconds of video if I had used that frame rate. Instead, I set the display time of each image to around half a second so that the finished ideo is around 40 seconds in total.

Camera=Canon 5D and lenses used were Canon 17-40mm zoom panorama and Canon 24-105mm for the time-lapse sequence. I use a Canon TC-80N3 remote controller/timer to cause the camera to take a picture every 3 minutes – I had set the camera to Av mode. I had meant to switch the autofocus off before I left but I discovered that I hadn’t clicked the focus switch fully – I did manage to turn off the Image Stabilization on the lens, otherwise the images might have been blurred. As a result, the camera stopped taking pictures once it became to dark to focus properly. Didn’t matter much – I only lost about four or five pictures.