Pixel Therapy is my term of endearment for those times when getting out to snap a photograph is not just a par for the course event in my life as a photographer. It goes deeper than that. Pixel Therapy for me is something that is more of a necessity borne of the need to be outdoors. The reality being that the photography is more the byproduct of that time needed to be spent in the wilderness, on an Ocean shore, atop a mountain. It is the catharsis of time spent cooped up, restricted from doing that which defines me. I revel in the exploration of nature, in the witnessing of special moments, the capturing of a moment defined in uniqueness by the positioning of a leaf, a ripple of on a lake surface or the shadows cast by my subject. Yesterday I found solace in Pixel Therapy derived from a composition that had, form many month, gone unnoticed.

A super long exposure, in this case 170seconds, transformed a heaving body of water into an exquisitely silken canvas.

We've just had a storm pass the island, in fact the first small typhoon this year, remarkably late too by most records. This in turn had churned up the Oceans into a mixture of pounding white capped waves and frothy white ocean shorelines. After a quick walk on the beach located just two minutes from the apartment I'd noted it was around half tide. The rocks that line the banks of a nearby river were at being tormented by wave after wave of incoming Ocean water. It was a perfect setting, not simply as a photographic subject but also as an example of the continuous energy exerted by Mother Nature in the ongoing conflict between the Land and Sea.

Armed with my Canon EOS5DSr that I'd fitted a Laowa 12mm f2.8 super wide angle lens to I set off, pixel therapy awaited. For my own personal taste I no longer photograph the Ocean using standard shutter speeds. I prefer to portray the motion of the Ocean by way of lengthening a shutter speed. Given I was shooting in the middle of the day I had to have a way of allowing that process to happen, and so I break out my Neutral density filters. These filters are, for want of a better term, sunglasses for your camera. Darkened layers of glass that in bright conditions allow a photographer to lengthen a shutter speed in order to expose correctly through an artificially darkened scene.

For this particular shot, as there was huge amounts of ambient light, I had to go extreme. I selected an ND10000 which basically reduces by a factor of 13 full aperture stops the amount of light entering the camera lens. This in turn required, given my aperture of f16 and sensitivity of ISO160, a shutter speed of 170sec in order for me to correctly expose the scene. And this is the magic of super long exposure photography. What was a raging and tumultuous body of water became tamed and silken. Anything moving in the image simply get's 'ironed' out. People, vehicles and animals that may walk through the frame disappear. Clouds become almost as silken as the Ocean.

It becomes the epitome of Pixel Therapy. Satiated I could retreat to the apartment. But I feel the pangs returning, as I stare at my camera bag and start thinking of the potential for another localized composition I have forming in this cavernous void of a creative mind...

"Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence."

Eadweard Muybridge