Category: Photo of the Week

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Fishnets in the Morning

Often when we are looking at the charts of both familiar and new sailing waters we see areas marked off as ‘fish traps’ – no go areas during particular times of the year.  In our home waters of Narragansett Bay I have yet to see any evidence of the fish traps but nevertheless we stay well clear just in case.  In the bays towards the end of Long Island however it’s a very different story.  Nets strung out between poles like the one above are a common sight.  I have yet to work out what kind of fish these nets are intended to catch or in fact to ever see anyone paying any amount of interest in them but they are a dominant sight just of the beach where we take the kids swimming.  If you know more I’d be delighted to hear about it.

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I've Gotten Rusty

Normally the presence of water makes things rusty.  For me, quite the opposite is true.  It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get out with the camera in any serious way and I really felt it this last weekend.  I was surprised that it took me one session to get back into a rhythm.  I sometimes feel like this even when I have been shooting regularly – the first 15 – 20 minutes are essentially me stretching and warming-up so that I can work towards the image that I have in mind.  If anyone has good ideas for a series of ‘stretches’ to make that first few moments on location more productive I’d be happy to hear them.

Fortunately the weather held out while I was at the beach which meant that I was able to get a few sessions in and came away with at least one image I was happy with.

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Island Bound

I’m getting ready to head off for a long weekend at the beach again.  It feels like one last summer adventure before Autumn gets her grips into  us.  I’m hoping for clear skies so that I can work more on my project capturing still things such as rocks in moving water like the image above.  This image was taken at the beach earlier in the summer during a longer stay that I had.  I got up early many mornings, taking full advantage of the fact that since I was only moments away from the beach I could get precious extra minutes in bed.  I generally like to arrive well before sunrise and generally shoot until sunrise.  I like the amount and quality of the pre-dawn light which allows me to easily blur the water as I did here.  This morning I once again learned the lesson that you need to be very careful when shooting around water – a rogue wave soaked me to the skin, fortunately I got my camera safely out of the water, and though I was a little shaken up I continued on shooting to get the image above.

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Going for a Spin

I have had a lot of fun so far this year looking for ways that I can bring a sense of motion into my photographs.  To do that I have been experimenting with moving the camera.  One series of experiments involved panning with a slow shutter speed, both vertically and horizontally, a variety of different subjects.  Some of the results I quite liked and I will continue on with those ideas.  On the day I took the photograph above I was headed back to the car after a morning shoot.  Although I wasn’t ready to be done, the sun was too bright for the kind of photographs that I prefer.  As I walked back down the road I noticed a patch of rocks that had interesting colors.  The straight shots I made were okay, but wanting something different I tried both panning the camera and rotating the camera.  The result of rotating the camera is shown above.

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Fogged In

It always surprises me that summer days along the coast can start off very foggy. This is typical of summers in Maine but also happens often in long island sound. Perhaps you already understand the phenomenon, I didn’t but after getting up at 3 am on a couple of mornings to find myself socked in with fog I thought that I ought to understand how to predict whether the morning will be foggy or not. This link seems to provide the answer.

Of course we can’t control the weather and with limited time sometimes you just have to roll with what nature serves up. This is exactly what I did on this morning. I was at a new beach and although I had a general sense of where I was going wasn’t 100% sure. I could hear the ocean but couldn’t see it. I headed along the beach until I found the rocks that I’d seen using google maps. Once on location I played around for a while and made the image below.

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Trees in Motion

I have been playing with the interaction of still and moving, generally trying to combine the two into a single photograph.  When I saw these trees together on my way down to the beach recently I wondered whether I could build on my interest in motion to create an image that I was happy with.  I took a lot of frames but was happiest with the one above.  I may try more of these!

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Postcard From My Beach Vacation

I’ve had a busy few weeks so it was great to be able to spend a week at the beach with my family.  My blackberry quit working partway through the trip which meant it was more than a vacation than usual!  Although I was on vacation I still managed to get up before sunrise on a couple of occasions and be back home in time for breakfast with the family.  I spent much of the time playing with these pilings that were at the waters edge.  Last year you could see a pair of pretty heft pipes running between the pilings, I’m not sure whether it was man or nature that buried them but they are gone for the time being.  I’m still trying to build in the habit of multiple shots per idea and so I worked around these pilings as much as the ocean would allow.  The beach drops of quite steeply here, so it’s easy to quite literally get in too deeply.  Of the images I shot on this particular morning this one stood out in the first round of image edits.

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Along the Shore

Along the Shore

I continue to work through the images I captured at John Paul Caponigro’s Maine Islands workshop. I have plenty to work on!

One of the topics for discussion was the use of graduated neutral density filters. With a well captured image the tools available in Lightroom and Photoshop make this type of filter redundant. However, I’m not ready to give up my filters just yet. I will usually take a number of images with and without the filters and see which I like the best. Even with the expensive ‘neutral’ filters from Singh-Ray, under the conditions I usually photograph I get a pronounced color cast. Sometimes I like it, sometimes not so much. The image above was taken without a filter and then processed in photoshop to add a digital neutral density filter.

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Still Motion

I’ve been developing a series of images exploring the juxtaposition of motion with stillness.  I’ve shared some of those images here previously.  More can be found on my main website here.  At John Paul Caponigro’s Workshop I spent time trying things that were on the fringes of what I would normally do.

One of the images that I made that I quite like is shown above.  It fits into the general idea of what I have been trying to achieve with my Still Motion series and yet is a departure.  This image was made on Monhegan Island on a misty morning, with very limited visibility.

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One Morning in Maine

Cadillac Mountain is the highest point on the eastern seaboard and as such is one of the first places to view sunrise.  This means an earlier start to the day than usual, even earlier in the middle of the summer.  The image above was made last weekend on my third visit to Cadillac mountain.  The first time I barely knew how to turn my camera on.  By my second visit I knew how to turn the camera on but didn’t know where to point it – I was however in great company.  The intro to this Joe McNally video was shot at the Moose Peterson DLWS workshop I attended on the day we visited Cadillac Mountain.  On my third visit to Cadillac Mountain I had learned more or less where to point the camera and I was again in great company.  This time with John Paul Caponigro‘s Maine Islands workshop, a challenging but fun few days.  More about that soon.