For me this brings back idyllic childhood memories at the beach. I'm grown up but I still relate to what these children are doing. I think we all do. I am fortunate to live near a beach like this. I can just hop in the car and be here in a few minutes. When I see that the conditions are good in the evening I'll drive over. By conditions of course I'm referring to photographic conditions. For me that means nice clouds. I took this at the height of spring break so there were tens of thousands at the beach. Even after living here for over a dozen years it still surprises me. At sunset everyone was lined up by the waters edge taking photos. Maybe a million pictures were taken within a five mile radius of me. It was kind of funny because I suddenly became aware that everyone was doing the exact same thing. And I thought I was the only one. Lately I've been working with prime lenses. This was shot with a Sony 55mm prime at F1.8. That just means I have a narrow depth of field with which to create a sense of distance. The blurring is on purpose, the out of focus areas give the image a dreamy quality, not as much realism. There were so many people that I chose to focus away from the crowds. You would never know hundreds of people were all around me as I took this. By simplifying a scene I'm better able tell a story. The story in this case is that the children are playing and in a world all their own, oblivious to everything around them. And for them this will surely become an idyllic childhood memory.
This is a cityscape panorama across Sarasota Bay. To create this I took three vertical images using a 55 mm lens and then stitched them together in Autopano Giga. The reason I did that rather than use a wide angle lens is it creates a realistic view of the scene whereas wide angle lenses tend to distort the sky. Each method has its use. My guess is that these sailboats are in a mooring field. There is another mooring field on the other side of that bridge just out of sight. That one is busy but this one seems to be long term as I've seen the same sailboats sit here for years. The day was a little hazy but the clouds added an extra dimension to the sky. These types of scenes, urban panoramas across the water, represent a technique I find appealing. Sky and water frame a cityscape and create a different perspective. It's a little like looking down from an airplane only in this case we're looking across. I have a coffee table book I'm working on called Sea and Sky; it has a few images like this. Another thing I like about these stitched-together panoramas is that the image is very high resolution. That's good for two reasons; it allows the viewer to zoom in and explore the details and, it can be used to create large prints. This resolution of this image can produce a print that is six feet across without losing detail. That makes it suited for large spaces like offices or hallways. In a few years camera sensors will capture more detail than they do today. Actually these already exist but are specialized for surveillance and mapping. However soon even landscape photographers like myself will have them. And when that happens we'll be able to pass the time just exploring the details of a scene like this on someone's large wall.
As the name implies, the Cliff House restaurant is atop a cliff overlooking the pacific. This is a long exposure I did a few months ago. I came back about a month later and each time I was lucky enough to see a good sunset. As a result I have a tonne of pictures from every angle and many of them like this taken long after the sun went down. I used to shoot film and photos like this were impossible. You might get close but it was trial and error and required precise measurements, settings and calculations of exposure length. Now in the age of digital I can have images like this in a matter of minutes and know exactly how it turns out. So it's no wonder people like me love shooting in low light. It's a relatively new phenomenon in the age of photography. Speaking of cameras and the age of photography, that giant camera at the edge is a Camera obscura. The idea was first used in the 1600's as a painting aid. It's an ancient device that employs the same principal as a pinhole camera by projecting a reflected image on a wall or table. Here is a reference to it on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura). I wonder if cameras will become obsolete in some future timeline of ours. They have come so far in a few hundred years and things are not slowing down. Maybe our eyes will get replaced with hi-definition sensors and view screens and then we can choose to save images or share with others in a virtual reality universe. Would the people that invented the Camera obscure recognize the cameras of today? In that same vein then I will not recognize cameras a hundred years from now. Given where we are headed with sensor tech and VR, perhaps my idea is not so far fetched.
