Spot #3 Kurnell -The Day the D90's went for a swim

Spot #3 Kurnell -The Day the D90's went for a swim, originally uploaded by Sutto 007.

It was a cold winters morning on the coast of the southern Sydney suburb of Kurnell. Jason, Ray and myself met inside the Botany Bay National park at 5:30am to take photo’s as part of our weekly Sutherland Shire Flickr walk. Justin decided to sleep in after a heavy night on the turps.We had about a 5 minute walk to the cliff edge where we had to climb down about 20 metres to the waters edge, with the assistance of an old piece of weathered rope and a handful of carved foot holes in the sandstone the three of us decended down to the water, backpacks on, tripods in hand and torches illuminating our way. Once down at the bottom, Jason illuminated his Lightanator 3000 (no patent pending) to show me what was around us, we originally intended on doing some light painting but realised the tide was a little to high and the swell was slowly building, so we started getting our gear out.

Today was going to be a day I would never forget, but at the time did not know it. Jason had just taken delivery of two Rainsleeves that he purchased over the internet, having never used them before Jason kindly offered one of them to me to use on my Nikon D90, after 15 minutes of putting the Rainsleeve over my 9 month old D90 and my Tokina F2.8 11-16mm one month old wide angel lens, we were ready to move to our individually selected magic spots to get our photo’s of the sun rising.

I moved to a position just above Jason and to his right, I set my camera and tripod up and started taking a few photo’s. The image below was my first shot for the day and I thought, what a great spot, maybe I should move closer to the water, over onto that rock to the left, the raised square one looks good.

Jason, being the water baby that he is, and wearing his shorts and water shoes, ventured down onto the lower rock platform and set up next to a rock wall to his right, Ray disapeared, as usual, to get that perfect shot of a ‘Rock’. I kept on higher ground, I dont usually get as venturious as either Jason or Ray, but, today I thought I would venture a little closer as I had protection from the elements over my camera gear.

This was going to big a big mistake.

The swell was growing, waves were breaking over the rocks in front of me, Jason was now in water up to his ankles, Ray, was somewere far away with his calculator working out the best position, aperture, ISO and speed for that perfect ‘Rock’ photo.

The waves were getting big, very big, so I set my tripod up, with my Aparture wirless remote trigger, composed my shot, took a few test shots, had the camera set to full manual mode, manual focus, high speed burst mode, great all done, Rainsleeves on, Im set, nothing can hurt me now. I stepped back about 5 metres and started taking a few shots, then, here it came, the wave of the day, and myself and Jason are in the perfect spot to get that one excellent keeper for the day, oh shit! The wave came, it was enourmous, my camera was shooting away, then it he me, my camera and Jason, and he thought he was protected behind that rock, and I thought whats the worst thing that could happen.

It happened, I got hit by this enourmous volume of water, drenched up to the waist, my camera? over it went tripos, D90, Lens remote trigger, the lot, crashing towards the rocks with about 2 metres of water pushing it towards the rocks, I still had my finger on the remote trigger, going through my head was three things at first, keep the shutter going, and D300 or D700, D300 or D700, which will I buy next to replace my water soaked D90. Running towards my gear I saw Jason’s left hand come out of the white wash with his tripod and camera held high out of the water, this is a common pose of Jasons, and his right hand came straight for my gear thinking it was going to go in the drink and never be seen again. I grabbed my gear, it was submerged with the wave rushing over it, I reached down grabbed it and thought that was it, how wrong I was, I turned off the camera and carefully removed the camera from the Rainsleeve, and not a drop of water had gone onto my camera body, the only water on my gear was on the UV filter and of course my tripod.

I learnt a few very special lessons on this day.

* Do not go into locations like this alone
* Always wear protection, on your camera
* Never reject an offer from a mate

And apparently another important fact, as quoted by Justin, at coffee after wards, “You know how you can tell if your camera got wet, lick it, you will be able to taste the salt, salt doesn’t smell” thanks Justin, we all wanted to know that.

So here are all the frames taken during this episode of, ‘My fotographylife’