one of the most important things to have in your kit as a landscape photographer is persistence. Some times shots practically fall in your lap. You drive by a location , the light is right and the subject is perfect. You hop out of your car, walk ten feet, aim and press the shutter. You walk away with a perfect image. This happens. That is the exact circumstances that I had when I made the image of the grave stone associated with my black and white issues article.
Now, for the cold hard facts, that rarely happens, when it does it is great, but don’t expect it. The picture featured here took me about 5 years to expose!
Half a decade ago that dory showed up at my favorite secluded beach on cape cod. I have captured some of the most amazing sunsets at this beach, so I thought I would have the most iconic weathered boat image in no time and I did get some decent ones. I always thought, though, that I wasn’t maximizing the potential of this subject. So every trip to the cape I would head down to this beach, sometimes both sunrise and sunset of the same day. After two weeks of vacation, I would have hundreds of good images of that yellow dory. Still I knew that little boat had more to offer, so the cycle continued. I shot that dory from every angle, low, high, front lit, back lit even an aerial shot. I made thousands of images and lots of good photos but I knew that little raft wasn’t done with me yet…
last summer that all changed. We were on the cape for five weeks. That boat was the first place I went to visit, like and old friend, we caught up very fast. The tide had gently left my friend in the perfect angle pointed towards the horizon. Sea weed was gracefully dangling off the rope that connected her to the mooring and was beautifully back lit to show off its amazing green translucence. The sky had the most perfect clouds for the scene. Almost as if the sky had created a heavenly arm reaching out over my old friend. Of course all of this was reflected because the tide was not completely out yet and left a shallow layer of water across the sand.
I would love to claim that I had previsualised this scene, but honestly I had no idea the setting could be this perfect. When I made this image I new I would not have to bother this old boat anymore.