You think you’ve seen waves before? Well, probably not waves that look like this. Photographer Rachael Talibart took the picture above, as part of her new wave series, after a storm on the southeast coast of England. Her series, called Sirens (inspired by Homer’s Odyssey), is shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Award; it also will be exhibited at the Sohn Fine Art Gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts, in September.
Talibart grew up sailing with her father in the English Channel. The problem was that she got seasick. Her cure was to sit in the cockpit and stare out at the ocean. “I spent ages staring at waves,” she told Wired magazine. After her photography career took off, she spent more time taking pictures of them.
Talibart took the picture above on a February morning after a storm produced a high tide and strong winds; the sun broke through the clouds to give some dramatic light to the crashing waves. To get the shot she lay on her back on the beach, with her feet pointing toward the water, and used a super-fast shutter speed of 1,000 frames/second to capture the power of the waves. “By using a fast shutter speed, I can freeze that motion,” she says.
Originally, Talibart shot in black and white, but she switched to a near-monochromatic desaturated color. She says her pictures look like sculptures.
Each picture in the Sirens series has a different name, inspired by a mythological god or goddess. The one above is called Niobe, who was involved in a tragic story about the consequences of hubris. In the myth, Niobe offended the gods by bragging about her 14 children. In retribution, they killed her entire family. She then pleaded with Zeus to end her pain; he transformed her into a rock. To see more of Talibart’s Sirens pictures, open the link below.
https://www.wired.com/story/wave-photography/
