The Malaysia Journals #3 - The Fallen Filter

The Background:

So I went to a Virgin tropical island replete with beaches full of White Sand, emerald green waters, deep blue skies and a lot of serenity. Very alluring sight, ain’t it? Photography must have been a cake walk here, you must think by now. Read on.

The Story:

A few hours after getting out of the beach and making the shots that I posted before, we took a stroll across the length of the beach. A local hawker then sold us tender coconuts straight from shores on the trees. I'm sure that was trespassing on someone's property and just making a quick buck. But hey, that is Malaysia for you!

A bit later, we embarked on a short trek across the island to check out the Coral Beach, the other area on the small island where there are resorts. Apparently, you could just walk into the beach here and start snorkeling directly due to the proximity of the corals. This However, we didn’t dare to venture into the water yet again for the long beach was much better as the Coral beach was actually backwaters of the South China Sea lacking the aggression that one might expect out of an ocean. We gave the sunset a miss due to the furious thunderstorm that was building up and hurried back to the east coast.

It was still a few more minutes before they would turn on electricity in our resort and hence we decided to hang out at the beach a little longer. It started drizzling and the sea was starting to become a little more violent. As always, I wanted to get a few blue hour shots - seascapes this time. We ended up on a few wet rocks and I made a few shots. It was an eventful and very uninteresting hour as my complete setup - Camera, tripod, wide-angle lens and the circular polarizer - took a fall, straight onto the slippery rocks on the beach. 

I lost my trusted Nikon thin Circular Polarizer on the way, but I’m grateful that it stopped at it as we all know that it could have been worse.  Moments later, I got over the grief and made this shot. The irony about this whole episode is that my lens was totally drenched before the fall and hence I don't have any usable shots from the composition that I took pains to setup amidst the rocks.

We then retreated back to our hotel, had a nice beach side dinner and played catch-up with each other’s life since college. Overall, a very nice first day of vacation, with just that one blemish.

Rethinking filters:

I've always been a vigorous proponent of not using filters - especially the UV ones, but I think that this incident might have just made me change that stance. While having another piece of  glass, however optically superior in front of your lens does amount for a certain trade off on image quality, I'm now certainly convinced of the insurance that it provides. At least, in smaller falls like the one that I had. 

In the near future I'm definitely buying an UV filter and of course, the replacement Circular polarizer. I already have my eyes on a couple of B+W's. But as I went to check that out, I made a plunge on a Neutral Density Filter kit that has been long overdue. Until then, I think that I will just have to stay low and  play safe.

1.6s . f/18.0 . ISO 100 . 10 mm on the Canon 10-22. No filters used. Read above to find out why if you had skipped it.