I love visiting Maine in the summer, especially on the coastline where I can’t get enough of the beaches, lobster rolls, and great scuba diving. One of my favorite spots is the Nubble Light, and I wanted to give it a try for a sunrise photo on a trip I took last summer. But good sunrises are driven by cloud structure, and the sunrise forecast on SunsetWX was consistently unfavorable. Then on one morning things looked a little bit better, so I chanced it.

Last year on a trip to Hawaii, I took a nice morning walk along a trail between Hapuna and Kaunaoa beaches. I was looking for sunrise light, but I slightly overslept and just missed blue hour, getting golden hour instead. The bright sun was already harsh, and there wasn’t a lot of morning color in the sky on the western coast of the Big Island. But after walking for a bit, I discovered this wonderful view of trees, water, ocean, and clouds from a vantage point above the Pacific. I loved the orientation of the trees and how the light and shadows fell between the trail, the inlet, and the trees themselves.

When Gwen and I visited Carmel-by-the-Sea in 2018, I took advantage of California’s geography and beaches to take photos of the sunset. The last time I posted a photo from this trip, it was from right before the sun had set below the horizon. This photo is from well after sunset – about 35 minutes later than the earlier photo. This was well into “blue hour” territory, and one could argue the light was closer to dark than blue. But from the very last drop of light in the sky, I was able to compose and shoot this piece of driftwood on the beach.

We took a trip to Cozumel last December to scuba dive, but unfortunately I caught a cold on the first day. Since diving and sinus infections don’t really mix, I grabbed my camera and looked around for some photography instead. Cozumel is a weird little island because all of the development is on the west side of the island, and all of the public beaches are on the east. What you won’t find are any public beaches on the west, making sunset photography from a quiet little beach practically impossible. So this photo represents the next best thing – a shot from the El Mirador beach on the southeast corner of the island looking back across the narrowest stretch of land possible.

Sometime you just wake up and want to take photos. That was the case in 2012 when I took this photo of the Plum Island jetty near Newburyport, MA on an early November morning. I recall having in mind a pretty sunrise, but I ended up getting a cloudy bluish-gray morning instead. Not to be deterred, I went on to take this photo of the clouds over the jetty, mirroring the sea below.