FOUR AFTERNOONS ON THE COAST OF

NORTH CAROLINA 

JANUARY 16, 2026

               MOONRISE OVER THE COAST

Happy New Year to everyone. I’ve been away for awhile, mostly due to the press of world events. It is difficult to focus on photography when there seems to be a new outrage every day on the front page which exhausts my attention span. Even though I have been reasonably successful in getting angry instead of being reduced to despair, it’s been difficult to work on my art. In addition I had another software situation which seemed to wipe out four years of blog posts and took a month to resolve. If you want to read any of these posts they now contain the images that had somehow disappeared, and we are back to square one.

Fran and I had the privilege to visit our son Benjamin and his family in Wilmington, North Carolina for three weeks in October and November. We stayed in a rented condo right on the beach, which was delightful and only twenty minutes from Benjamin, Margaret and Isaac’s apartment in near Downtown Wilmington. 

These four images I will share with you today bring out a few truths about travel photography. While it is my belief that return visits will improve your images of a place, it is also true that smaller places have only a certain amount of subject matter available for image making. It is easy to have the feeling that you are just duplicating the images that you created several visits before, and lose a certain amount of energy. One of the solutions to this dilemma is to concentrate on lighting and weather conditions and ignore the fact that you seem to be taking the same photograph again and again. You are not, and of course unless you show a selection of these images like I am doing right now, your audience has no idea that you have duplicated your efforts, since they usually see only one image.

               OCTOBER 30 : CLOUDS OVER THE HORIZON

Another problem with the coast of North Carolina, as well as the coast of almost anywhere in the world, is that it pales with the coast I am most familiar with just an hour from my house. The Oregon Coast is so spectacular that it is easy to find every other shoreline a little disappointing. I had to learn how to appreciate what was in summary a small, flat shoreline that held little interest beyond the horizon.

              OCTOBER 30 : FISHING IN THE LATE AFTERNOON

I thus started two play with that horizon, and to concentrate on the different, but subtle weather conditions that greeted me each late afternoon when I sat down on the balcony with my camera and my novel as I waited for the sun to go down. I decided to crop these images to a panoramic 2:1 ratio to emphasize the breadth of the beach and to ignore most of both the sky and the foreground which faded into boredom the farther you looked away from the horizon. I placed the horizon in my panoramic frame depending on which half, the sky or the sea, held more interest that day.  Most of the time the sky was a clear winner since the beach was so flat and uniform and the surf so gentle.

               NOVEMBER 1 : ALPENGLOW WITH SEAGULLS

The other attraction to the East Coast is that of course the sun is in the wrong place, and sunset is out of the question. Now you can shoot sunrise, but it is not quite the same, and I’m not getting up that early in any case. But you can still explore the light qualities of alpenglow, even though there are no mountains to light up on the horizon as the sun goes down behind your back. Each day the ten or so minutes near sunset would provide a slightly different version of the bands of colors that appeared above the horizon. And depending on the day, I found a band of clouds that could reflect the light or something, anything, that could add interest to the never ending seascape below.

              NOVEMBER 3 : ALPENGLOW WITH MOONRISE

You can judge how successful I was in getting something out of what was generally exactly the same scene each day. I literally took these photos from the same chair, at about the same time, over a week. The first view was one of the only days that had a little cloud formation on the horizon. Almost every other day of our three weeks was either total blue sky or total cloud cover, neither of which are very conducive tor landscape photography. The next day I finally actually saw a boat in my field of view and turned it into a silhouette in a field of bright sunshine. A couple of days later some birds finally showed up to provide a little foreground interest. And finally the turn of the month brought on a rising moon to add some interest to the late afternoon.

All of these images received only a modicum of post-processing, since the initial interest was the exposure and the colors in the original snapshot. The most important decisions I had to make to create the final image was to crop them to a panoramic ratio and then to decide where to place the horizon within that frame. The colors are very true to the actual conditions, with only a little darkening of the upper sky to focus the viewer’s attention back toward the horizon.