smathers beach

Have you ever visited the northernmost tip of Long Island or the southernmost tip of New Jersey late in the Fall?

Off the long beach fronts, the skies are wide and mostly cloudy and the Atlantic reflects the gray, adding it's own tinge of seaweed green.
The air is clean and crisp with the smell of the ocean. The gusting offshore breeze carries the damp spray and the temperature is somewhere between 45 and 50 degrees.

There are so few people around that, with a little imagination, you could swear you had either beach to yourself.

I enjoyed a nostalgic taste of all that yesterday on Smathers Beach.

I'd grabbed a cab out to East Martello to drop of my annual offering for this year's Anne McKee Art Auction. I guess it was just past 11 in the morning and with the "cold", a little more quiet than usual for a Sunday morning.

My original plan was to drop off the artwork and hang around the fort to shoot the long morning shadow effects behind the walls and sculptures. Obviously, that wasn't gonna fly so I did my thing at the museum, waved past the docent on my way out and he waved back wishing me a "great day".

Crossing back over South Roosevelt, to the ocean side, I was about to call cab to cruise me back home again but stopped for a minute to look out over the Atlantic. "Hmmm. . .", I thought, "Let me get a quick picture of this first. . ."

Well, one shot lead to another and then another and I was wearing my walking shoes anyway so, forget the cab and let the games begin.
(once the bug bites, I can't say no. Hell, I don't want to say no. It's what I do. . .)

It was Orient Point and Cape May in Key West!

Off the long beach front, the sky was wide and mostly cloudy and the Atlantic reflected the gray, adding it's own tinge of seaweed green.
The air was clean and crisp with the smell of the ocean. The gusting offshore breeze carried the damp spray and the temperature was somewhere between 45 and 50 degrees.

There were so few people around that, with a little imagination, I was sure I had the beach to myself.

The thing about creating artwork is getting captured by the muse and mentally moved to an alternate reality where the creative process becomes a meditation. If I'm working on an illustration or a painting, the meditation lasts, uninterrupted, for hours or days until the work is finished.

The cool thing about photography is that each act of taking each picture becomes it's own, very short but no less intense, meditation. Study the scene, become the scene and the mind of the camera, release the shutter. For those few brief seconds, subject, intention and mind become one and nothing else exists.

That's the "druggie's high" for me when I'm creating anything. Losing, completely, any sense of self and becoming the creation.

Anyway, 4 hours and 235 pictures later (you've gotta love digital photography), I was back home and happy as a clam who'd escaped the Sunny Sea Seafoo0d cannery.

So, the docent's wish came true and I had a really great day. Seems like a "win win" all around.