Trip to North Carolina, Part VI: sundowns at Atlantic Beach

Saving the best to (near) last wasn't my intent in organizing posts for my trip last month to North Carolina. I chose chronology because it seemed the simplest way to maneuver through the collection.

It is by mere coincidence that this post on the sunset/sundown shoot at Atlantic Beach, the shoot that resulted in the most dramatic colors, silhouettes and compositions on the trip, comes near the end of the chronology.

As excited as I was about these shots, photos from the shoot at Cape Lookout National Seashore on July 19 also resulted in photos that I was very pleased with. You can judge for yourself after seeing the next post.

For now, we'll stay in Atlantic Beach, where my decision to bracket compositions for later
treatment in high dynamic range (HDR) software to optimize detail proved to be a wise one, at least I thought so. At the very least, the image of the sand mound leading off the post is a dramatic example to support that move. It's an HDR rendering; the image at right is a single frame of the same image.

A full gallery of images from the visit to Atlantic Beach can be found following the link in this sentence. There isn't much else to say in the text here, so let's get to the pictures!

Next post: Cape Lookout National Seashore

Above: This shot of the lifeguard station took a dramatic turn when I processed the bracketed images in HDR software. I was pleasantly surprised. I did nothing to tweak the colors here.

Above and next two below: Here are three versions of a scene near a beachside social hub adjacent to the pier at Atlantic Beach. I preferred the one above because of the sand, footprints and blades of grass in the foreground. But I also made several other compositions of the same scene, using the sky as the focal point in the two below and zooming in on the outdoor plaza and meeting area in the second below. One other note: I pulled back on the natural purple hues in image above but left them in tact in the two below. 

Above and below: Two versions of the same scene, taken at only a minute apart. In the one above, I was squatting or on my knees, looking to get the golden reflection off the mini-walls running along the left side of the boardwalk. I went prone for the shot below, which gave me a different view of the sky and a different color on the walls.

Above and next two below: Slightly different views of an area where I noticed the sky was of interesting color. For the version above, I cropped to make the grass more prominent. For the shot below, I present the original color version as I shot it to make the sky most prominent ... and a monochrome crop to minimize the sky and draw attention to the blades of grass.  

Above and below: Slightly different compositions of the same scene, which I credit to Lee Ann for spotting it and nailing it with a shot similar to the one above. The monochrome below moves the railing on the roof of the building to the far left. 

Above and next three below: I hope you indulge my explorations of different "looks" in an image. Here's an example where I wanted to see different hues in my monochromes, beginning with the color above, and an antique tint immediately below followed by a blue tint (to add to my "blues" collection) and the straight black-and-white.

Above and below: Another example of making slight compositional adjustments to the same scene. The one above uses only a hint of the grass blades while incorporating more of the buildings along the beach, while the one below minimizes the buildings, increases the grass blades and includes a lifeguard station and a hint of the ocean on the far left. 

Above and below: A couple shots of people enjoying a walk along the beach and playing in the tide.

Above: The drive on the backside of the buildings you saw above.

Above: The Atlantic Beach water tower. This HDR version is much more dynamic than the single-frame. 

Above: I decided to end this post in a reflective way, which isn't difficult to do when you're looking at skies like this. That's Lee Ann serving as my "human" element.

Trip to North Carolina, Part V: Atlantic Beach, daytime

The "daytime" portion of the Atlantic Beach posts mostly is about a dissection of the shot you see leading off this post, a frame taken with the iPhone outside of the Crab Shack in Salter Path, N.C., about six miles west of Atlantic Beach. The monochrome version is the first photo below the text, with a slight crop on the left to remove the matter in the upper left corner.

Even though I ventured out twice for sunset shots while in Atlantic Beach, these shots at the Crab Shack were taken a few hours before sunset, so I am leaving them out of the next post, which will be devoted to the sunset shoots.

The restaurant faces Bogue Sound on the north side of the island, and while waiting to be seated for dinner that evening, I had a chance to capture these near-sunset shots. The one above, in particular, intrigued me, and I ended up cropping it several ways ... and also converting the shots into monochrome, which I liked a lot.

A full gallery of images from the visit to Atlantic Beach can be found following the link in this sentence.

Above and below: One crop of the photo was to better position the bird atop the pole as the focal point. 

Above and below: This crop simply removed some possible clutter on the left and right sides of the image to allow for a (hopefully) more dramatic image than the original.

Above and below: The monochrome versions of these two shots looking out at Bogue Sound, I felt, were so superior to the "color" versions, that I decided not to even present the color shots.

Above: A bird resting on a pole on the street where the house I stayed in was located.

Above and below: I got hooked into trying to get photos with gulls in the landscape. The ranged from the one above with a solitary gull, to the one below with a bunch of them circling above and even more on the sand. The food the couple was feeding the ones in the sand had caught the attention of those still in the air.

Above: A fishing boat got close enough to shore for me to get it in reasonably good size and sharpness with the zoom lens.

Above: Another high-dynamic range landscape juxtaposing the shoreside grass against the ocean blue.

Above: I took this shot because it was an example of an apparent tourist indulging in a trendy past time -- the selfie. This and all of the remaining photos in this post were taken in the evening, with very low light. I had to use a high ISO, so I pushed these images through a noise-reduction filter.

Above and next two below: These shots of the beach and the beach along it were taken at sunset, but I'm not going to use them in the next post. 

Above: I tried several times to get a sharp image of this ship at sea, which lurked on the horizon the whole time I was in Atlantic Beach. I lucked out, finally, with this -- with a seagull bonus in the bottom.

Trip to North Carolina, Part IV: Atlantic Beach 'sunrise'

The stop at Atlantic Beach during the weeklong swing through North Carolina entailed more photography than at Wrightsville Beach. That's largely because Lee Ann and I chased two sunsets and one sunrise there, compared to just the one sunrise in Wrightsville Beach.

I'll start the photo collection from Atlantic Beach with the sunrise, which occurred on the last day there. And it started out very disappointing. The day we chose to get up early for it (and this time we timed it properly), the sun was thoroughly masked by dense clouds. However, on the upside, there nevertheless were ample photo shots along the beach that morning, especially with seabirds feeding for sand crabs in the tide and people taking early-dawn strolls.

One of my favorite shots of the trip came that morning. Using the far end (270mm) of the Tamron 18-270mm lens, I was far enough away to inconspicuously get off a few shots of a man walking his dog as the two of them approached me. I turned my camera to shoot some seabirds as the man and dog came upon me, and when they had passed, the dog wandered out of the composition to investigate something that had piqued its interest.
That left the man alone walking away from me and into a wonderful composition featuring the pier in the distance, the tide splashing against the sand nearby, and a nicely spaced row of seabirds feeding in that sand on either side of him. I present the color version of the image here; I prefer the monochrome version that leads off the post. As always, you can get a bigger and sharper version of the images (especially if you access this blog using a mobile device) by clicking on the photos.

Another welcoming composition featured a woman (right), an infant bundled in her arms, walking snug to the lapping tide, just behind a couple of seabirds. A ship out at sea in the background and a gull in the upper left corner add secondary elements, hopefully offsetting the slight vignetting ones gets when the Tamron lens is zoomed at maximum focal length (270mm).

One couple who had seated themselves in a spot in the sand well away from the tide, after seeing us photographing anything we could find of interest, tried to alert us to the intermittent bobbing fins of a small school of porpoises they'd been spying for a while. I had trouble finding the fins even with their help pointing in the direction of the sea where they had seen them. When I finally saw them, I put the camera up to compose ... but as it turned out, my one glimpse of the fins turned out to be the only one I'd get. The porpoises had disappeared from view.

A full gallery of images from the visit to Atlantic Beach can be found following the link in this sentence.

Next: Atlantic City daytime

Above: The man pictured at the top of this post as I photographed him with his dog as they approached me. This shot was taken a minute or so before the one above.

Above: The start of a series of images featuring the seabirds feeding for sand crabs where the tide stops on the beach. A man eager to go for a swim prepares to dive.

Above: In my tweet (@konz2624) of this photo, I used a caption something along the lines of : " ... and my mate has to like long walks along the beach." 

Above: Among my favorites of "seabird only" shots along the beach.

Above: I wasn't able to succeed in getting many shots of a seabird with a leg in mid stride, but I got it with this one.

Above: I was going for the fishing boat/seabird juxtaposition here for a composition idea. I'm not sure it works, but ... I present it anyway for your consideration. 

Above: I shouldn't have to say too much about this; it's strictly another juxtaposition composition.

Above and next two below: I finish with three landscape shots, the first (above) inspired by Lee Ann, who saw this leading lines opportunity before I did. She hasn't finished processing all of her photos yet, so hers could very well be much better than this. The image below I include because of the luck in including the seagull over the pier in the composition. The last image was something I had high hopes for ... for reasons now I'm not sure of. I think I was going for the spartan-like look of the white house standing out above the others juxtaposed with the wooden fencing. But I disliked the color version, and it wasn't until I converted it to monochrome that I felt it was worth keeping.