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Entering The Port

Entering the Port
A cruise ship entering the Port of the Everglades in Florida                                         Obtain a fine art gallery print

This weekend I was in Fort Lauderdale where I captured this ship entering the Port of the Everglades. This was just one of a half dozen or so I watched from the beach in the predawn hours. My hotel faced the Atlantic so that I could see the ships all lined up single file as they waited to enter the port. The preceding evening it was the reverse with the ships streaming out in the opposite direction.

I walked down to the very end of the beach along the jetty at the entry to the port. Standing there the ships pass so close I could probably hit them with a beach ball. It’s a strange feeling standing there as a tremendous amount of mass passes only meters away. It overloads my simple mind. I’ll bet the people in those apartment buildings have quite the show each day.

The orange light coming over the apartment buildings is the light from the port bouncing off of the clouds we had Sunday morning. The whole scene was surreal and totally unexpected. I love little surprises like that, especially when I’m out with my camera. It’s been said that photography is fifty percent just getting out and putting yourself in a place where something might happen. Sometimes it works out and of course I get really excited when it does, kind of like hitting a great golf shot. This image for me is a three hundred yard tee-shot straight down the middle of the fairway. I better stop now before I start mixing my metaphors.

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Fort De Soto Beach

Fort De Soto Beach
Fort De Soto Beach just outside of Tampa Bay                                      Purchase a framed gallery print

Visits to the beach

This is Fort De Soto Beach a couple of days ago. With the holiday over we decided to head to the beach and unwind. This is a section that looks across towards the Sunshine Skyway Bridge as it enters Tampa Bay. I don’t spend as much time at the beach as you might think. I go for photography quite a bit, but to sit and vegetate, rarely. I suppose that’s common among us who live here, we take it for granted. I go maybe two or three times a year. But as I say, for photography I go many more times than that. In the end it doesn’t matter because I do spend time along the shore with the waves, breeze and sunsets; I do not take that for granted, at least not yet.

How I created the Image

I worked on this image for several hours this evening. I used a motion blur and carefully blended the original layer. Prior to that I created about ten layers in Photoshop to carefully craft the image to an idea I had in my minds eye. Then finally I used a Lightroom preset to give it an overall desaturated tone.

What I was thinking at the time

You may understand some of these technical details but if not, no worries. The point is, on some images I spend a lot of time and effort to transform an image into something resembling a dreamscape. For no other reason than I like to and, I think that dreams can be just as important as ordinary life. I’ve heard that we make our own reality, so if that’s true, then sometimes I like to create a reality that is a little bit ethereal like a dream, one that I would like to inhabit if I could; at least in my mind.

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Sunday at the Beach

This was taken at the Lands End beach in San Francisco. When a big wave came in it landed in a flat section behind the rock. Then as the water receded it created this pattern of ripples in the sunlight. A simple thing but I thought it was pretty awesome. This image is a composite of three images all taken from the same location. The first image was a long exposure of the water receding and forming this pattern. To do that I had to use a small aperture and a neutral density filter. Then, I added the waves on the left from another image that was a short exposure since a long exposure makes the sea appear calm. Finally a third image was taken of a gentleman walking along the beach. To create this image I stitched all three back together to convey a sense of what I saw on that lovely Sunday afternoon at the beach.Obtain a print
This was taken at the Lands End beach in San Francisco. When a big wave came in it landed in a flat section behind the rock. Then as the water receded it created this pattern of ripples in the sunlight. A simple thing but I thought it was pretty awesome.

This image is a composite of three images all taken from the same location. The first image was a long exposure of the water receding and forming this pattern. To do that I had to use a small aperture and a neutral density filter. Then, I added the waves on the left from another image that was a short exposure since a long exposure makes the sea appear calm. Finally a third image was taken of a gentleman walking along the beach.

To create this image I stitched all three back together to convey a sense of what I saw on that lovely Sunday afternoon at the beach.

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Sanibel Beach Day

When I took this I was sitting on a towel right next to the gentle waters of the Gulf of Mexico on Sanibel Island. It's hard to convey the feeling; maybe it's the sand, the warm water, the breeze; maybe all these combined. Sometimes the waves are so small you might think you were on a lake. The bigger waves along the Atlantic coast of Florida are fun to swim in also, but nothing compares to the calm waters of Florida's west coast.
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When I took this I was sitting on a towel right next to the gentle waters of the Gulf of Mexico on Sanibel Island. It’s hard to convey the feeling; maybe it’s the sand, the warm water, the breeze; maybe all these combined. Sometimes the waves are so small you might think you were on a lake. The bigger waves along the Atlantic coast of Florida are fun to swim in also, but nothing compares to the calm waters of Florida’s west coast.