Monday, January 13, 2025
Welcome back, and congratulations on making it to the last blog entry from this trek that spanned from Thursday the 10th, until Tuesday the 14th. If you want the back story of how this all came to be, take a minute and visit part 1 of this series. If you have read through that one, but have missed the second day, give that a quick read as well before we get started with this entry. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you.
Still waiting…..
Don’t take too long, because this one will be worth getting to….
Almost there I hope….
And there we are, all caught up, so you know that I’ve been setting out each morning for close to a two mile hike in both directions from the hotel to capture what I felt were the best locations for the conditions that I had. I usually don’t get to say this, but I had actually nailed both mornings and picked the right spots for sunrise each day. The tides were favorable for what I wanted to accomplish, and the sky matched up with what I had in mind. The first day could have been chalked up to dumb luck, and the second day possibly the universe giving me an anniversary present for Toni’s and my 14 years together. The chances of getting it right three days in a row were slim to none, and I had just gotten word that slim had left town.
Not expecting much, I really put no pressure on myself, and actually found that I didn’t really think much about where I was going to go. I considered returning to one of the two locations that I had already shot, but that seemed redundant with so few days here. There was one location that I had never shot around Carolina Beach though, and I figured that would probably be a good place to start. Since I usually have a good time with piers, and had been around a mile away from the Kure Beach Pier on the first morning, I figured that I could just walk a little further and work with it. Looking at the weather, there was about 50% cloud cover expected, but they were going to be low clouds which usually aren’t good for color at sunrise. I also knew from experience that this forecast could mean total cloud coverage, or clear skies as well. I had ideas for either event unfolding, but I was hoping for some really brilliant color as I always do when I head out on these early morning treks.
When Toni and I were going to sleep on Sunday night, we were talking about how long I might be out there. I remember saying that the morning could break either way and it could be a quick outing that stops once the sun came up, or it might be a morning when the photos don’t even get started until the sun is in the clouds. I had no expectations, but even though I was considering driving the three miles out to the pier, I had a feeling that I was going to be walking on the off chance I might find something else worth photographing if the sunrise didn’t turn out like I was hoping. That meant that this was going to be an investment in time with two hours dedicated just to walking there and back.
My clock rang a little earlier than it had the previous mornings, and for the first time, I was actually awakened by the alarm. I got up and actually didn’t feel overly motivated, but went through the motions because this was going to be the last morning that I had the opportunity to get any photos short of working right outside of the hotel. It wasn’t nearly as cold, so I didn’t have to bundle up quite as much as I had the previous two days, but I still wanted to stay nice and warm for being outside near the water for extended periods of time.
In order to make it a little quicker I opted to take the road through town which allowed me to step up the pace without the slipping sand beneath my feet. I actually made good time and shaved nearly five minutes off of my estimated travel time by foot. All the way there, I was looking at the sky. Oddly enough, when I started out, I could see stars which made me thing that this was going to e a quick event like the pier I had shot yesterday. By the time I arrived in Kure Beach, it looked cloudy. This was something else completely and I figured that I was going to have to wait a bit for the sun to come up and I was going to be doing long exposures in a high key way with the pier which I wasn’t opposed to. It was still very much up in the air.
I left the roadway and entered the beach about a half mile from the pier. I could see the LED lights that were on which gave me a very good reference point to how far away I was because it was still mostly dark. The sky was full of clouds, but off in the distance over the horizon, I could see an opening. It was a small opening, but in my estimation it was close enough to where the sun should be coming up that I had a lot of hope for some brilliant color in the sky. That was, as long as that opening remained. It was such a small and delicate slit in the clouds and I’ve seen situations like this before where the clouds closed up in a matter of minutes and any chance of color would be snuffed out. I knew that this was a distinct possibility as I approached the pier almost at a dead run.
I was rushing because I knew from past experience that the camera would see color that I could not in these low light conditions. I was running through the last shots that I had taken the day before just in case I needed to alter any settings like the ISO (still kicking myself for that dumb oversight) before starting to capture the first light. I needed to be there and set up as soon as I could in case the clouds closed down and killed any chance of color. Fortunately, I pretty much knew what my composition would be, and I had checked out the tide charts which has us on the back end of high tide which meant I had a lot of water to work with, and that the waves would be getting further away from me as the morning progressed allowing me to get even closer to the water. It was just a race to get the shot before the clouds closed up.
When I finally arrived, I looked at how things were lining up and I saw that I would be better able to get a strong composition from the right side of the pier as that brought that slit in the sky right to the end of the pier while it was a little too close from the left. I placed the camera bag on the rise of the sand which stood very little chance of getting wet and placed my tripod just outside of the waveline on the sand. I knew that I wanted a bit of a wide angle look here because I wanted to get the sky which was showing textures and hints of color all over. The excitement was building by the second, but I had to hurry. I grabbed my standard zoom which would give me what I needed in terms of focal length and skipped any filters. I needed to know how the sky was going to turn out without any help, only then could I determine what was needed. Remember, I was hoping to capture something that my own eyes were not able to quite make out just yet.
I took a guess at the exposure and set a two-minute-long exposure after getting the composition dialed in. At something like a minute and a half a wave came in and forced me to grab the tripod as it started sinking on the front leg. That exposure was ruined, but I could see that it was overexposed by a good bit. I relocated the tripod a bit further back and reduced the exposure a bit and fired off another frame. This one was much better in terms of the sky which was looking radiant in red, but the LED lights on the pier were completely blown out. I’ve learned that LED lights are terrible to work with because for them to do any good visually, they have to be super bright, unlike the old incandescent lights which would illuminate more with less output. I had to work the exposure once again, but the color was getting stronger and it was now something that I could see with my naked eyes. There was a bit of blue in what was the upper right of the frame which I absolutely wanted to capture because it is that blue in the sky that will always add legitimacy to the colors that are present in the sky.
It was on my eighth try that I finally got everything to look just right. The color had spread through most of the sky except for that all important upper right corner that was still a dim blue. The ocean was smoothed out in a way that I thought fit the overall photo and composition. The lights on the pier were exposed within reason and I knew that I could work with them in post at this point. Even the horizon with the bright yellow was not clipping which made me very happy. This was not something that I wanted to try for an HDR blending because of all the motion at play in the scene. To be able to get it all in a single shot was very important to me, and the fact that I was able to get a beautiful 30 seconds worth of exposure without a single filter attached made me even happier because there was nothing about this scene that made me wish for a filter. I wanted it to be an honest representation of what was there.
Honestly, I was extremely happy about my choice for locations for this last day, and if this was the only photo that I captured, I think I would have been ok with that, but I kept on going. The slit at the horizon remained much longer than I expected and I continually shot looking for that best combination of lighting in the sky, motion in the ocean, and exposure balance between all the different tones. I would just make small adjustments to the exposure settings as the light changed, but kept the overall exposure the same because I knew that it was working well the way I had it. It was more about getting different effects in the water because I didn’t want this to all be long exposures. I really felt like I wanted some options with the waves being rendered as an additional layer of texture to compliment the sweeping sky.
I did notice that there was another guy a bit further up the beach that was taking photos. It looked like he was using a phone, but I wasn’t sure because of the low light. I also didn’t want to pay that much attention to anything other than what was unfolding in front of me. The colors had been amazing, but they were starting to recede back to the horizon allowing the deep blues of the low clouds to become much more visible. The sky above was also starting to show up as a much lighter tone, almost white with the blue clouds stretched across it like cotton candy. The colors were not as brilliant, but the scene somehow felt just as spectacular. I continued shooting as the first blush faded away.
25 minutes later after that first keeper was shot, and with 55 more frames captured, I ended up with my second keeper. The colors had dropped down to the horizon with just touches of red on the lowest portions of the clouds. My shutter speed had crept up to 0.4 seconds which was showing the detail in the waves that I was after. I had gotten into a routine of releasing the shutter right after an incoming wave started to flow back out to the ocean. This gave me some nice frothy lines in the foreground as well as usually a new wave about to crash. The sky above needed that visual drama, and showing the waves gave me just that effect to provide balance to the entire frame.
This photo shows the importance of having the blue tones in the frame. The sky looks more natural this way and you can tell that there was no digital trickery involved with the colors. It just appears natural, and it was just that. I still hadn’t added any filters to the camera. In fact, the biggest alteration to the scene that I have made with this one is to flip it horizontally. It serves the purpose of giving a bit of variety to this series of keepers, but more importantly, I think that this one needed to be flipped to aid in how it was read. With the scene in the original orientation, the eyes zoomed past the pier and landed on the bright portion of the horizon which was fine, but the image started to feel very static. By flipping it, the horizon is the first thing that you see, and then the pier pulls your attention from that spot and allows you to start to explore the rest of the frame. That is when you see the waves, and the red kissed blue clouds above. There is much more to this photo when viewed in this direction, and that was exactly how I wanted it represented.
It was during the time that I shot this photo that the other guy came over and introduced himself. As it turns out, he was also a photographer. He was using his phone, but he was capturing some very good photos with it and knew what he was doing with it. We chatted a bit about what we both liked about photography and how gorgeous this sunrise was. He lives in the area, so he gets to see a lot of them, but this was one that really stood out to him.
We both continued shooting as the lighting was changing. It would get better, and then would fade a little, but get better once again. It was during all that up and down that this last photo was captured, and I really thought that this was going to be the end of the morning and I was waiting for the switch to flip and the clouds block off the sun for good. I felt very lucky to have gotten the images that I had and knew that I had at least a couple of keepers out of the bunch which was more than enough from a single composition.
I was losing track of what all I had shot though, because I was steadily conversing with this other photographer. During that conversation, a third gentleman came up and introduced himself. He was also a photographer that had just come out to the beach. He mentioned that he really wished that he had brought his “real” camera to witness this sunrise, but all he had was his cell phone. We added him into the conversation as well, and continued to talk about different things related to photography and how glorious the colors had been during this sunrise.
And then it happened…
There are moments in photography when everything comes together and you are gifted with a scene that just needs to be captured. I was about to witness one of those moments. It happened a total of three minutes and twenty-five seconds after the previous photo, and it was nine frames later when the second blush came. The photos leading up to this moment shows that the hole on the horizon had been closing up, and I left wondering if there would be a second blush at all. It was really looking like things were just going to turn off at any second.
But they didn’t….
There was a moment when the sky came to life and every element that I could have asked for happened all at once for a 0.3 of a second exposure. I had a perfect wave, the blue clouds mixed in with the red ones, and the hole at the horizon was partially filled with clouds keeping it from blowing out, but they gave a beautiful yellow glow to compliment the reds and blues. The whole scene looked like something out of a dream. There were no filters at all used here, and short of some dodging and burning, this is exactly how the camera captured it. The last time I saw a sky this ferocious was when I had first started with photography during a trek to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Back then, I had no idea how to capture this kind of spectacle, but the photo still came out brilliant. It has taken nearly 20 years for me to find another sky like that, and here I was with two witnesses to share in the moment.
The very next frame, showed how the clouds were starting to come over the sun, and there was a deep shadow introduced in the sky to the right of the scene. I still continued to shoot 18 frames for nearly ten more minutes as the color faded from the sky. They all had that deep shadow on the right which killed it for me. Had I not gotten this one moment of perfection, there were several in that group that might have made the cut. What I had captured just prior to the sun being partially blocked, however, was the one photo that I was pretty sure would be the best one from the entire time at the beach. Had I traveled all this way and only got this one photo, I think I would have been satisfied, it was just that good.
The three of us waited for a bit longer in case there was a third blush, but that never happened. The clouds slowly returned to blue and the clouds on the horizon covered up the hole where the sun was going to be peeking out. It was over, but boy what a show it had been. We all congratulated each other for having captured this sunrise and we spoke about different things in photography. Hopefully, I will run into them again because they both have expressed interest in joining me on a workshop at some point in the future. Speaking of which, I do have two workshops in the making right now and you can sign up for them. My workshops are not a typical photo expedition as I am not a tour guide. We work in places that will provide plenty of subject matter, but my goal with workshops is to help you become a better photographer by teaching you some of my techniques and sharing how I see a scene and how I create compositions. I want to add tools to your toolbag and give you things that you can lean on when you run out of ideas, or have a hard time capturing a scene the way that you have seen it. If you haven’t been on a workshop with me, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. Most of my clients return for several workshops which makes me think that I am offering valuable information that is well worth the admission price. I invite you to be your own judge to that claim.
Before I get too far off track, let’s go back to the beach where the decision has been made that the sky had lost all interest and the color was now all gone. I packed things up feeling quite satisfied for my morning’s adventure. I bid the fellow photographers a good day and started walking back towards the hotel. Since the sky offered no excitement for me, I decided to cut back to the street and see if there was anything long the way that might make for a good photograph. As I was working through the residential area right on the oceanfront I head several folks on decks talking about the sunrise. This was one for the books, and each of them made mention of how vibrant the colors had been and how perfect it looked. I couldn’t argue with them at all. It had been incredible.
As I walked, I was thinking about making this a limited edition print. I say “this” loosely because I really didn’t know what I had captured yet, but felt that there was at least one which would jump out as more special than the others. In hindsight, it has to be Kure Beach Spectacle, because it checks every box that I would have wanted in a photograph. It was one of those moments when the reality exceeded the expectation. It represented a trifecta of correct choices through our stay at Carolina Beach. I had been at the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment, and the right skillset. There are no perfect photographs, but dang….this one is so close I think we are splitting hairs. Was I going to make this a limited edition print?
This is something that I had done when I first started out for the first three years I think. I would pick out the ones that I thought were so much better and determine a number of prints that I would issue. This was five prints to start out with, and then I moved to ten for some of the latter ones. Looking back at those photos, they are nothing special at all compared to what I am shooting today, and most of them are embarrassing for me to look at. It doesn’t help that I never sold more than two prints out of a limited edition run, which means that nearly 20 years later, there are still prints available from those limited editions.
I know that times are different and the quality of my work is miles ahead of where it was back then, but I still have to wonder if it is even worth doing limited editions. I mean with the exception of some of my coastal work which has been chosen for many different commercial clients, my prints will usually only sell in single digit numbers. Essentially, everything that I shoot becomes a limited edition, just not numbered. They are all unique and those who have purchased prints from me can rest assured that they have, in many cases, a one of a kind photograph. Those photos that end up mounted on hospital walls all over the coast of NC are usually different from the direct sales that I do, and none of those prints are signed by me. In fact, usually, the crop is changed to match the designer’s need, so the print is slightly different from what I will sell to my clients.
But what about limited edition prints now? My thought would be to do a limited run of prints and have them step priced with the later numbers being less expensive than the #1 print of the series. Essentially, if you get in early, you get a discount. The longer you wait and the more that sell, the more expensive they will become. This makes a lot of sense to me, but at the end of the day, do I create a run of five prints, maybe ten, possibly 250? No matter how many I choose, the chances of finding homes for more than a couple of the prints becomes statistically unlikely based on sales history. Then I am left with an Albatross around my neck holding onto prints for many years which impacts their value as well as the value for the collectors of my work.
Because of that reality, I have decided to leave this an open edition knowing that anyone who purchases it will still be in a very small group and the print will still maintain its value. Plus, it gives me the opportunity to change up the size and media for the client rather than picking a size and mandating it for anyone that would want it. This is my gift to you. There is no discounting that this print is going to be magnificent and nearly perfect, but I want to keep it accessible for anyone that might want it, and at a price that makes sense. Even with inflation, I have not upped my prices at all over the past several years. The last price change just reflected including the shipping or delivery charge in with the print price so that the final price was easier to figure out. I have no plans on increasing my prices any time soon, but I am pretty much at the bare bottom of what I should be charging for my work these days.
That was a lot of thinking that started on my walk back to the hotel, and it continued until last night as I was mentally preparing for typing out this blog entry as well as a final decision on what to do about this particular print. There was more going through my mind on the way back to the hotel though. I knew that this was going to be my last good chance at photos because we were needing to leave kind of early the following day to get Toni back in time for her appointment. I had roughly an hour’s worth of walking ahead of me and that was plenty enough time to find something else to shoot.
There was one hotel that I had passed on the beach during my first morning out which had caught my eye. Anyone that has spent any time around Kure Beach will know this hotel because it has a rather unique pattern painted on both buildings. They had done a rainbow of sorts with a mixture of straight lines and curves that went through the different portions of the building. When I had seen it for the first time, it was from the beach side and there was a green building that I liked as an element with the colors, but hadn’t been able to figure out a composition for it. This time, when I got to the hotel, I was looking at it from the street side and there was no green building from this view.
It still caught my eye, but I wasn’t sure about a composition. From this side, I could see more of the architectural qualities of the building which I enjoyed, and the striping was still present here as well. The sky beyond the building was almost the same tone as the building, but I could see some faint texture to it that made me think that I might be able to get a few photos of it where the decoration really popped with everything else being a more neutral tone. This is one of those types of photography that I would like more experience with and figured that I might as well work this pair of buildings for a little while. I found a spot in the parking lot that was far enough away that I could reduce the perspective distortion and then chose my telephoto lens to reduce it even more.
I looked around the two buildings for areas that had a certain visual appeal and where I could make a composition that made sense. One of those compositions was of the main entrance that had some palm trees and an overhang shelter below three distinct sections. Those sections all had the painted stripes that went together, but were broken up due to the angle. This was a bit of visual interest that I really liked and decided to give the composition a try.
I had no choice but to include the trees in order to get the stripes in the frame, and to include those, meant that I had to include the roof of the shelter. I placed all of that at the bottom of the frame as a bit of foreground and to introduce some contrast to the scene which was largely in the same area of the histogram. I did a vertical orientation to draw attention to the three sections of the building and included enough sky to give it the proper sense of depth. There wasn’t much texture in the clouds, but with the sunlight coming from directly to my right, I felt that the polarizer would help to add a bit of contrast. It did, but only slightly.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to like this one, so I tried a few other compositions on the other other side that seemed to work better when looking through the LCD. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that the first composition that I shot was the one that I liked much better than any of the others. It actually turned out really well and met all of my goals for it. The one that I was most excited about just looked odd on the big screen because of the perspective, and by the time I figured out what aspect ratio looked the best, the whole idea started to fall apart. This wasn’t the only success story from this location though.
Before I packed the camera away, I started looking at the other building which wasn’t quite as tall. It offered some different elements from the first building that I had photographed, namely the red framed windows on the edge of the facia. The actual rooms were also visible with their blue exterior walls which went really well with the lower stripe. I found a composition that worked which showcased these elements at an angle that worked well. I made a few shots of this and hoped that it would work out. After a little work with the transform tool in Lightroom to correct some of the distortion that was unavoidable, I had a photograph that met my expectations. It wasn’t a grand photo by any stretch, but it worked and is something that is quite unique in my collection, so I’m happy to have it.
After spending a little bit of time with this hotel, I packed up my gear and continued on my way back to our hotel. I was still looking for things to shoot, but I was also realizing that I was getting very tired. There had been a lot going on over the last few days and I was starting to slow down. The light wasn’t all that great for the subjects that I had to work with either which kept me from being inspired by what I was seeing. I still kept looking though.
When I got close to the hotel, I remembered seeing a collection of lifeguard towers in storage close to the road. Looking up, the clouds had a bit of texture, and I thought that maybe I could do something with them. I walked over to where I had seen them and started to look at the scene critically. It was a very chaotic scene and there was a lot of clutter around the background since they were positioned next to the Emergency Services Building, and right at an intersection. In every direction, there were buildings and power lines. In a few directions, there were tall hotels to contend with. What I was looking for was a shot concentrating just on the towers because I liked they way they looked all stored together.
The only way I could think of to make this work was to shoot down low and avoid the lower sections of the towers which weren’t all that interesting anyway. By getting down low, I was able to avoid any buildings from one angle, but there were power lines running through the entire scene from this vantage point. For those that have followed me for any length of time, you you will know that I hate power lines with a passion and will do anything I can to avoid them. However, they didn’t bother me in this situation. They actually went with the shapes within the composition and helped to organize how the chairs were situated. The only thing that gave me an issue was the transformer on one of the poles that was kind of right at the collection point of all the lines. This was a distraction, but if I was careful about where the camera was situated, I could easily mask it behind one of the chairs.
I grabbed my standard zoom and a polarizer for a bit of extra contrast in a very flatly lit scene. Once the tripod was positioned very close to the ground, I mounted the camera and started to fine tune the composition. It was coming together easier than I expected, but that was probably because I had embraced the remaining clutter and knew how I wanted to organize the different elements. I fired off a couple of shots to get the exposure just right because I knew I was going to need detail in the sky in order to make it work. Once I got that figured out, I switched the camera to black and white to see how it looked in that presentation. I liked it, and decided that this was most certainly going to be a black and white image when it was all said and done. It was that last frame that made the cut because I changed the composition every so slightly for the black and white version. It all worked together quite well, but there was no reason to stick around any longer as neither the sky nor the light was changing at this point. I packed things back up and decided to call it a day.
However, I stopped to check out the place that we were going to eat dinner later on, and as I was walking around the side of the building, this view caught my eye. The building was painted red, but the paint was very uneven. The light turquoise building to the side made the red pop. I also liked the angles of the buildings and there was a chair that matched the turquoise siding underneath a sign for “Candy” which somehow felt beachy to me. I looked at this scene for a few moments and decided that it was worth a frame or two. Because of the clutter that I was dealing with, and wanting to limit the sky in the shot, I knew that I was going to need my telephoto lens for this. I backed up to a point in the parking lot that I felt would work out and got the camera put together. When I tried to frame up the shot, I realized that I was too close, so I backed up another 25 feet or so and this felt much better. There was a bit of contrast missing, so I added a polarizer which darkened the windows against the red paint. This worked out well.
It took seven frames before I found the exact right composition and perspective. My goal was to do it all in camera rather than fine tune the crop in post, or clone out things that I didn’t like. It was a fine balancing act, especially to get the chair and Candy sign included in the frame. What you don’t see is that the privacy fence ends right at the edge of the frame which opens up the view to a lot of things that I didn’t want included. My left to right movements with the camera were all for the sake of getting the chair and sign included in the photo as a framing element for the red section.
Once I had the composition dialed in, I shot another five frames as the clouds changed slightly in the section of sky that was visible. It was the next to last frame that turned into my keeper from this scene. It all came together as good as I could have hoped, and I was really happy that I had stopped to work it. I wasn’t sure about the way I was going to process it though, because the red was going to be way too vibrant for taking up that much space in the frame. But at the same time, I didn’t want to lose the color contrast between the buildings by doing this as a black and white.
When it came time to do the processing on this scene, I fairly quickly decided that I liked the desaturated color profile that I use for a lot of my decay work these days. It muted the reds while keeping the turquoise about the same intensity that it was to begin with. The tonal relationships made more sense with the profile as well. Once I started the processing, the photo came together very quickly and I was loving what I was seeing. It is not my usual photo, and once again, I decided to leave the power lines as they just made sense to the scene with these being operable businesses. It was the apparent weathering and age that I really enjoyed here, and all the touches of cooler tones that contrasted with the warm reds which were now more like a deep orange red that suited the overall scene much better.
As I had been shooting this one, Toni had spotted me from the window by the elevator and felt inclined to send me a picture of….me. She had no idea what I was shooting and probably thought that I had lost my mind. I can’t recall exactly what she thought I was working on, but she only saw trash and clutter in the area. Of course, with the distance that I was shooting from, there was no telling what was in my frame. She did also mention that she was done with breakfast and had brought me up some cereal as requested. I was worn out, a bit hungry, and obviously close to the hotel, so I figured that I would head back and get some breakfast and a shower.
The plant had been that I would be out most of the day photographing because of the clouds. The lighting was good, but I wasn’t able to think of any more subjects to shoot with that lighting. Once I got out of the shower and finished my breakfast, I laid down and took something like an hour and a half nap laying in Toni’s lap. When I woke up, I had no gumption to do anything else, so we just stayed in the room and watched television for a while. When we started to get hungry we headed out to the diner that I had just photographed and had dinner. We weren’t quite sure what to expect, but I’ll tell you what, it was one of the best Cuban sandwiches that I have had. In fact, both of our meals were excellent and we had another dessert that should have put us both in a sugar coma. It was the perfect ending to our anniversary getaway. We did a little walking around after our meal to work off some of the calories that we had just put in. It was nice out compared to how cold it had been, though I was still chilly from the morning’s adventure.
We took it easy the rest of the night, and got up early the next morning for one last run at the continental breakfast before heading home. About halfway back, the roads showed signs of dried salt on them, and by the time we hit Greensboro, there was a lot of snow left on the ground. This continued until we got home with heavier salt on the roads the closer we got. This whole trip started off with snow falling and brine on the roads. We spent several days in the salt air, right next to the ocean, and then came back with copious amounts of road salt as well as drifts of snow in places. It had been a very salty period of time, but it was so worth it. Toni and I had a great time, and I came back with some really fantastic photos that I am still over the moon about. I just wish that I could have gotten started on the edits and processing when I got home.
Instead, I needed to get all the different levels of salt off of the truck because I could still hear it rusting away right out from under me. This took about four and a half hours, but part of that time was spent dealing with our refrigerator which has been giving us serious problems since Thanksgiving. It was finally determined that it would be replaced under warranty which meant several different phone calls in the middle of working on the truck. It all got figured out, and by the next morning, I was sitting in front of the computer culling through the 297 files that were saved on my memory cards. Of those, I ended up with 27 keepers, several of which might just be in the running for 2025’s significant image list. Those took me nearly two days to work through, and I wasn’t able to start on the blog until late in the day on Thursday.
There was something to be said for writing the blog as I was in the middle of things like I had done at the Outer Banks last year. I had to look back at that experience to remember how many photos I had come back with. I was surprised to realize that the total there was 65 keepers from 668 frames. Of course, I was there for a bit longer than this time and I had nothing but time for photography during those days while I was there. It was nice when I got home to pretty much have the blogs finished except for the last one. That really saved me time after the fact. Fortunately, I have been able to get an entry done each day once the photos were finished up, so I can get rested and ready for the next trek. Hopefully, it will be another short one with only a photo or two, as I really do like those quick turnarounds.
Thank you all for joining me for this adventure, and for the well wishes for our anniversary. Toni and I both really appreciate it. I hope that you have enjoyed the photos, and really hope that there are ones in this collection that might look good on your walls. I just can’t wait to start seeing these in print because I know they are going to look awesome at full resolution. Seeing them here on a digital device is like cheating and you don’t get the full effect. These all deserve to be printed large and dominant in a room, and I would love to be able to make that a possibility for you. If you just don’t have the room on your walls, but still want to show some support, consider making a donation to my future treks. There is a certain amount of expense that I absorb in order to get to these locations, and photography is not a cheap endeavor to begin with. Any little bit helps, but I would always prefer to earn the money through providing prints of my work.
I think I am due a bit of a rest at this point, so I’m going to call it a day here. I’m not sure when I am going to get back out there again, but I’m excited about what I will create when I do. Come to think about it, I still need to clean up the camera after the exposure to the salt air. Fortunately, it wasn’t a matter of sand blowing everywhere this time which I have had happen more than once at the coast. This will just be a quick wiping down and cleaning of the filters and lenses in preparation for the next trek.
Until that time comes….
Quick reference index
Day 3
