After Sunset

Seagulls wading the surf shortly after sunset at Robert Moses Beach

The beauty about photography is that you never know what to expect and rule #1 is to always keep an open mind. I have come to learn that if I have any type of preconceived notion of what sort of picture I want to capture, I more often than not fail miserably. This might be especially true for landscape photography, where you can never 100% predict the weather, the clouds, the wind and the lighting conditions resulting from all of the above. I came to shoot what looked like a promising sunset, yet ended up being bland and boring and disappearing half way through behind a thick layer of haze. Yet the light reflected beautifully in the sand once the sun had set and those gulls just made for perfect models.

First Light

Fishermen walking into the first light of the day at Robert Moses Field 5

There are few things in life which I find as magical and enchanting as experiencing the sunrise at the ocean, no matter what time of the year. These days it feels quite fresh out here by the water, but the sun rises late enough that it is easy to catch. Photographers and Anglers are the only crazies you will find out here at this time of day.

Dashing

Dancing with the waves

Yes it's true - after more than a six-month hiatus, I have decided to revive this blog. There are many reasons why I stopped tending to it - not having a car to get around, not being able to process .RAW files any longer, my husband's hospitalization, our sudden move and my sudden overkill freelance work schedule for three different jobs are just some of them. But, I am excited to be back and I hope that some of you will return and stay with me!

This shot was taken at my favorite Robert Moses Beach field 5 after tropical storm Danny made for high surf warnings and a lot of people came out to watch the waves. I shot a whole series of this kid and his friend running through and from the surf. But this crisp silhouette shot is my favortite!

Setting

Sun setting between dunes

It's been a while since I've posted here and it's been a while since I posted one of those ocean shots, so hopefully, I'll get away with it. I felt as if I was just on a roll, when some horrible injury befell my beloved Black Lab Boris. It's called "Fibrocartiligous Emboli" or FCE for short and basically paralyzed his hind legs. Thankfully, in his case the prognosis was good and 5+ weeks later, he's made an astonishing recovery. But for the longest time, I couldn't take him along on my photo excursions and it simply felt wrong to leave him behind, therefore I didn't really go anywhere at all. But now that he's much much better, our first outing was to our beloved beach, and although some stupid park rangers prevented me from taking him all the way down to the water, I managed to take some poster shots of the sinking sun. It really was a nice sunset, and that dune grass helped a lot to prevent the usual overblown glare. The clouds were pretty cool too!

Glowing

Janitor's closet at the beach

Something about the washed out turquoise color of the wood in combination with the orange glow streaming from this janitor's closet at Robert Moses Beach appealed to me, but proved very hard to "catch". I tried many different angles and exposures and just couldn't quite capture it the way I saw it with the naked eye. The glow on the other hand was nicely enhanced by the way my camera interpreted the incandescent light while I had set the white balance to "cloudy". It's always fun to play around :) .