Salt Marshes

I shot this from a moving car, while we were on the way to Beddeford Pool, where my son used to live. The clouds were so right, the blue sky reflecting on the ground and the perfectly placed rocks made this look at least to me like a beautiful painting. One day, I will paint this one.

It was just too beautiful not to share with all of you.

Rocky Shoreline in Ogunquit, Maine

While in Maine, I want to show you all that I didn't only take photos of the lighthouses even though they're one of my favorite subjects.

The shoreline in Maine is very rocky. It's strange that even though this is the same ocean, and the same coast how it changes as so radically as you get further and further south. Here in Florida, we have no rock and our water is more of an emerald green.

All my life I've lived on the coast. I've lived in Maine, Connecticut, New York and Florida. The coasts and water color varies so much. What a wonderful continent we live on. I never get tired of living by the sea and can only wonder how people who have lived their whole lives inland who have never seen the sea don't know what they're missing. This is soooo beautiful. There's nothing like the smell of sea air.

Safety Harbor Shoreline

This beautiful scene was shot the same morning as I shot the pier at sunrise. This little part of the shoreline is to the left of the pier. I've seen this many times, but during the day it looks kind of bland. It just goes to show you how the various qualities of light can affect a scene.

When you've found a beautiful landscape, you should always photograph it at different times of day. You'll never know what beauty you can find otherwise.

Settings for this scene were as follows: It was shot at 6:50 am, just 20 minutes before sunrise at ISO 200 for 13 seconds at F16. I chose ISO 200 so I'd get less digital noise (grain) and F16 for two reasons; I wanted to be sure everything was in focus from near to far and I wanted a slow shutter speed to blur the water and make it smooth. I used Aperture Priority mode so I could set the aperture, with 0 exposure compensation and partial metering on the grass (which is as close to 18% gray as I could get. Since the light was changing very fast, I set my White Balance to Auto; not that it makes a whole lot of difference when shooting RAW. The focal length was 18mm with my 18-55mm lens.