... Personally I'm betting on ocean.

This was the first outing with a new toy, the Hoya 62mm Variable Neutral Density filter. This provides me with the ability to reduce the light by between 1.5 and 9 stops, so in this case by stopping down to f/16, adding 2/3rds of a stop exposure (needed due to the greyness of the morning; we had a blissful southerly change overnight to ease the summer heat and humidity), and cranking the ND filter up to "kinda high" but a couple of stops shy of "holy s**t![1]", I got the exposure out to 2 seconds which managed to turn a breaking wave into the wall of water that we see on the right.

For this one the surfer stood relatively still for the whole 2 seconds. In earlier ones he didn't making him a ghost as well, though that's not entirely a bad thing. (Confession, though; when I originally processed this I left him as he was. Later on I decided to do a Gaussian Blur Smart Sharpen on the Background layer, which worked out well as it sharpened him and the rock puddles but had no visible impact on the motion blurred waves.)

In fact I had not been shooting him originally. There was a bird sitting roughly where he's standing which I intended to place against the backdrop of walls of water. However the surfer walked out to exactly where my bird was, which of course caused the bird to take off. So I figured he owed me a model anyway.

The shoot identified one problem. I originally thought that I'd be better off getting the filter for the 12-40 since I envisaged doing most long exposure shots as (relatively) wide angles, looking along the beach and such. As soon as I started shooting I realised that I'd be better off zooming in on something close like a rock formation to serve as a solid foreground for the moving water. Which means... I really need this type of filter for the 40-150. (Which takes a 72mm filter, not 62mm ones.) Still... they're available in that size as well, and there's a Boxering day sale on, sooo...

[1] You just know that I did one with the filter set to "holy s**t!" as well, don'cha? That was an experience. First the autofocus was griping that it couldn't see anything (understandably) so I knocked back the filter, focused manually, then turned the filter back on. Then the Olympus was griping that I was exceeding the 60 second maximum standard exposure so I opened back up to f/14. Forty seconds later I ended up with an exposure that had such a blue cast that it looked like I was shooting underwater, and spots that look like (and probably are) lens flare. (Probably from me not having the lens hood on since I didn't think I needed it on such a grey morning and I wanted to be able to access the filter easily. And I didn't need it. Until I tried 40 second exposures.) So I shall play with that further, but I'm at least content that now I can finally get exposures in the 2 to 5 second range easily enough, which wasn't happening with my collection of lower numbered fixed NDs.