Poetry in Motion, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

A wave is poetry in motion. Always moving, never the same twice, full of life—the wave is a fundamental force of nature, the shape behind light and sound.

Over the weekend, I took a little time off and hiked down to Tennessee Beach in the Headlands with a friend. We left the parking lot in the fog, and ambled down the gentle trail the couple of miles to the beach. By the time we got there the sun was breaking through the clouds, and the scene was radiant.

This was a day of fairly big surf, with interesting waves. I decided to concentrate on the movement of the waves. So that I didn’t have to think about my camera settings, and so that I knew I could “stop” the motion of the waves, I boosted the ISO to 400, put the shutter speed to 1/2000 of a second, and used the exposure adjustment control to underexpose by one f-stop. Putting the focus mode to manual, and focusing at infinity, meant I didn’t need to worry about focus lag.

When the right wave came along, I was ready to catch it, backlit by the sun as it crashed on the steep shoals of the beach.