For the first time in weeks, if not months, I made it to the beach today. Conditions were so good I made it to the beach twice today. Continuing with the trend of spectacular light and air quality experienced yesterday, the Atlantic Ocean threw in a cool environmental wrinkle of its own: dead calm seas. I’m talking bathtub waves of no more than six inches calm. Not since my public works days when I was working on the beach daily have I seen the water tame; and even then it only happened less than one hand is needed to count.
Happy just to be out there I was content simply to hang out and enjoy the vibe in its totality. But with the sun comfortably set and a standout blue hour taking hold, I made my way for a bit of jetty rock that I had scoped out earlier in the day—during the aforementioned first trip to the beach—Harvey Cedars if you’re scoring at home. With an impressive pastel gradient stretched across the sky I waited for it to get dark enough such that my shutter could get sluggish enough. Lazy shutters for the win. Once you’re inside one tenth of a second, motion from ocean wave action usually takes hold. Of course things had to be a bit more sluggish than normal due to the unusually calm water. Tonight I needed to get down to a quarter of a second. And opposite to last night’s photograph where I went with my first shot, this evening it was the last.
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