There is something very special about the beach to me. Whenever I am nearing the beach, even if I can’t see it, I can feel it. No, I’m not a hippie who feels “one with nature” (ok maybe I am, I would love a hippie name like Rainbow Flower, but who wouldn’t right?) Anyway, when I was heading out to Jekyll Island I wasn’t sure exactly where I was, I was just following my iphone, but suddenly I knew it… I was close… because I could feel the beach. When you are at the ocean suddenly the air seems thick and there is a smell, not just of salt but dirt, like fresh dirt, and of course there are the birds, always more birds. It just stirs something in me, suddenly everything in the world is right, how can anything be wrong when you’re by the ocean?

*For my Photographer friends*
I get quite a few e-mails asking questions about how I shoot, how I process, all kinds of great questions, so I thought that this post would be a good one to discuss one of my big delimma’s when shooting…the sun. Usually I try to find shade… always (unless it’s cloudy then I try to find where the sun is coming from and point my subject in that direction) but when you are on the beach, and it’s 11:00, and the sun is blazing …there is nowhere to go, you have to deal with it. For these photo’s the sun was not directly overhead, so I always tried to have it behind their faces, then I used some fill flash, and exposed for their face and blew out the background, I made sure that I would still have enough detail but I was willing to sacrifice some detail to make sure their face was exposed. Now, on the far away shots like the one of them walking away from me, since there is no “faces” to expose for, I didn’t worry as much about it.