Here is where I stayed. It isn’t really surfside, and it really isn’t a motor inn on the highway. You can have continental breakfast of coffee and English muffins with a dozen screaming children if you want though.

Great textures on the rocks. They are much more slippery than they look.

The seagulls were really chowing down on the crabs. The cool thing about this image is that it is zoomed in super close. So even at f1.4, with this gull in motion and small in the frame, there is still enough sharpness to crop in.

Would you believe I found a random redhead?

Lightroom 3′s lens correction feature is fun.

We couldn’t figure out what made these grooves in the sand. Yeah, I know it was the water, Einstein. But why?

Chatham Light.

All and all, I enjoyed the contrast from my usual desert-dry Colorado weather. The fog was so close to rain that it was dripping from the trees.

I rose before dawn this morning and took the 5 minute walk from the case down to the beach for my first Mexican Sunrise.

I’m imagining that I’m sitting on the beach, squishing the warm sand in between my toes. Mmmmmmmm.

I’m still catching up with all of the photo shoots that I did while I was down in Florida. I’m almost through with 2007, can I get a ‘Hell Yeah’? These pictures were taken at Fort Desoto which is at the very southern tip of the St. Petersburg peninsula. This day was so damn cold. It was 45 degrees and windy. Rachel was so cold that she had to go back to the car for a while and warm up. I was OK with it, because goosebumps aren’t fun to Photoshop! Luckily there were these cool old cement pieces of fort left poking out of the sand. We did a lot of shooting hiding behind them, using them as wind breaks.

I found one thing out for sure when I was in Tampa, there is not a shortage of girls who have aspiring modeling careers. A single Craigslist ad resulted in over a dozen responses. So it worked out really well for me. I was on ‘vacation’, I had free time, and my usual strong desire to practice practice practice. And what better way to practice than taking pictures of beautiful women? I knew you’d see my point.

The purpose of today’s exercise was to see what kind of images I could get without any auxiliary lighting or reflectors. My last Strobist flash style sunset beach shoot that I did gave me some great results. I was confident that I could do the exact same thing again, but how fun would that be? I’m only really enjoying myself when I’m risking failure. Is that really true? I don’t know, I’m just making stuff up to fill in the gaps between these photos.  Anyway, I wanted to work on my shooting in pure bright sunlight.

My main goal was to create some arty black and white images, as opposed to another Sports Illustrated style swimsuit shoot. I took a lot of weird pictures. I’m not sure if I like them yet. I will post them later after I take care of more important things first. In the meantime, Rachel was anxious for some pictures for booking some gigs, so I edited these ones, which are a bit more conventional. They are still pretty contrast-y though. I probably will use a reflector next time.

A funny thing about being a photographer is that when you go on vacation it’s easy to just keep on working. New scenery is inspiring, and leads to more and more shooting. Usually there is not enough time to edit all the photos that you take while traveling, so when you get home you have even more work than when you left! But when you have the opportunity to take pictures like the one above … a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!

I am doing a beach engagement shoot while I’m here for a very big wedding that I booked at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach Florida in December 2008. Being from Colorado, I’ve never actually shot on the beach before, so I wanted to do a practice run before this important client. So I found Eugenia to help me out with some modeling. She’s never actually done any modeling before, so she should be happy with the way these came out!

Eugenia brought a friend along with her to the shoot at Honeymoon Island Beach. As it turns out, her friend Amber is in need of some engagement pictures, but her fiance is in the military and was only going to be in town for 2 more days. Luckily I was free, and was able to shoot them the next day for some extra vacation spending money! Sweet!

More images posted after the page break …

I am not a black and white only kind of guy. And the site is looking a little drab, so I thought I’d add a splash of color today. This is an old photo that I resurrected for the portfolio. This is a small beach in Marblehead, MA.