We had arrived and scouted out this area the evening before. Knowing that low tide, when the boulders are mostly out of the water, would occur shortly after sunrise, we got up well before sunrise and drove to the parking area close to the beach. I hiked down the beach to this spot that my wife and I had scouted out the previous evening. I was planning to shoot a set of images just as the sun peeked over the horizon. Some 3–5 minutes before sunrise, the light was so beautiful that I couldn’t resist shooting a set of images. When we got home to the USA and I started processing my images, I felt that this image was by far the better of the shoots I did that morning.
The Moeraki Boulders (officially Moeraki Boulders / Kaihinaki) are unusually large spherical boulders lying along a stretch of Koekohe Beach on the wave-cut Otago coast of New Zealand between Moeraki and Hampden. They occur scattered either as isolated boulders or in clusters along a stretch of beach where they have been protected in a scientific reserve. These boulders are grey-coloured septarian concretions that have been exhumed from the mudstone and bedrock enclosing them and concentrated on the beach by coastal erosion.
I shot this at 100mm. The original full-sized photo is derived from 136 individual focus-bracketed, stacked images in a 4-row × 36-column array. Due to the huge dynamic range in this shoot, I used ETTR (Expose to the Right) to set my exposure settings. I spot-metered the brightest portion of the sky and set the exposure to +2-1/3 stops.
Shooting focus-bracketed panoramas is incredibly difficult when ocean waves are involved. I have learned that it takes very careful timing, making note of where a wave was in the previous shot and timing the next shot so that a new incoming wave is in the same position as the wave in the previous shot. During the focus stacking in Helicon Focus, you have to carefully select which image from the focus-bracketed set to use in any given area of the photo. Then, when stitching the images together in PTGui, one has to use creative masking to select which portions of each image to keep or remove for the final stitch.
The effort paid off. The full-sized original photo is 517 megapixels, 11,378 × 45,515 pixels, 38″ × 151″ at 300 PPI (96.5 cm × 383.5 cm at 118 px/cm).
