During a break in photography assignments, we took a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It is an easy drive from northern Virginia and is a nice break from our regular routine. Anytime you can be close to ocean waters you can really breathe a different kind of air for a nice recharge.
Creatively the ocean shore give so many possibilities.
This is one place where getting up early before the sunrise will yield fruitful
results for your photos. The far distant horizon will almost guarantee that you
will have some glimmer of morning light even during over overcast mornings. A
few mornings, I got up before the sun just to get a feel for what the light was
looking like. It was enjoyable just to be out there before the crowds arrived,
and when animals passed by both under and next to the breaking waters.
During our trip I found the beautifully set Bodie Lighthouse
a favorite subject. It had a minimal setting from where the structure was set.
The symmetry of the lighthouse and the clear backdrop made for some memorable images
that I printed for my walls at home. At night, we made a trip to the site long
after everyone else had left for the day. It was the perfect time to try a long
exposure photo. I got what I was looking for, but I left quickly after all the
snake warnings scared me from staying too long!
Analysis Paralysis will sometimes stall a creative process. It has been a while since I have posted! We have been busy with a lot of events, and we even took some time to go on some trips all around the country. I am back and finally getting some time to go through the photos. While going through the photos, I recall a question that my cousin asked as we were walking around his city. He asked – how do you find better landscape compositions?
I believe it is a combination of just shooting, and refining. Trying to overthink a photo when you arrive to a location can really take away from your enjoyment of your visit. Also, it may prevent you from getting any images at all! If it is a popular tourist, or familiar landmark like these North Carolina coastal lighthouses, you have a lot of images in your mind already. I always take these classic or overdone photos if I can to add them to my personal collection. But then, I use the digital tools, the back of the camera to review and get a better images before I leave the location. Here we found a nice dune overlooking the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. My first thought was to use my ultra wide lens to get a lot of the sky with the lighthouse in the far background.
Not good. You can’t even see the lighthouse and the frame is dominated by large areas of sand and coastal grasses. I did not see anything that was worth trying again, so I changed lenses. I wanted to bring the lighthouse to a more prominent part of the frame, so I put the 105mm lens onto the camera.
This is better. The lighthouse is larger in the frame, but I now see new distractions. There is a paved parking lot for visitors, and a radio tower both of which I did not even see in the first attempt. At least I solved how I wanted the lighthouse to look in the frame. Now I just needed to move my position slightly to move the distractions out of the frame.
Crouching in between the coastal grasses gave me this frame. Most of the distractions are out of the way. I like how the out of focus coastal grasses are leading your eyes to the lighthouse that is rendered sharply. But a few of the tips are a little too large, so they can take the attention away.
Just moving a few feet allowed me to find my final position. Nothing is blocking the body of lighthouse, and all the grasses are a consistently small size in the photo. I did have to crop a little from the left to completely get rid of the radio tower, but I am happy how this turned out. I really enjoyed making this image, but spent a lot of the rest of the day painfully picking out “hithchikers” that grabbed onto my sneakers.
We have had a nice string of “chamber-of-commerce” days in the Washington, DC area. The weather really makes it easy to get out and make photos around town. On this day, we were interested in exploring a park that had been recently renovated after the completion of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge construction. Jones Point Park is located at the Virginia side of the bridge, and has plenty of areas for recreation from courts, bike and walking trails. The Potomac River also borders the park which provides nice views of the National Harbor, the District, and the plane traffic from Reagan National Airport. The park also sports lots of unique historical markers being so close to Old Town Alexandria, and Washington, DC.
From a previous post, you can see some of the background on the DC Boundary Stones. These stones are the oldest federal monuments which marked out the perfect square that cut Washington, DC out of land from both Maryland and Virginia. The first stone laid in the project was at the southern corner at Jones Point. Today, the stone is protected behind a sea wall right by the shore, adjacent to the Jones Point Lighthouse.
From here, there are lines and other markers that show the original borders. In the middle 1840s, the Virginia land that was part of DC was given back to the Commonwealth. Walking the park now, they have lines marking where the old border used to be showing DC, Maryland and Virginia. Even though you cannot directly view the boundary stone, they do have a nice see-through marker above the stone so you can look down on the stone.
So here comes the FUN part! You can see how close the shore is to the stone. The ground on the other side of the fence was very soggy, and not very stable to stand. I did not feel like breaking my ankle to get a photo of the stone in the wall, so how did I get this photo?
Please send your guesses to the TimeLine Media Facebook page, or to the comments section below. The first person to correctly guess how I was able to take this photo, I will send you a coupon for $50 of prints or digital downloads from the proofing site! I will post the answer in an upcoming blog post. Good luck!
