My work travel sometimes take me to the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, but in the past I had never brought along my camera. My previous trips were always in the winter (or whatever passes for winter in LA), which meant shorter days and less opportunity to get out and watch the sunset. But on my recent trip in late-April, I knew I would finally have a chance to see the beach on a wonderfully sunny late afternoon.

Last November we took a scuba diving trip to the Maldives. While we spent most of the trip on a liveaboard boat, we did spend a little bit of time visiting a couple of the Maldives’ wonderful islands. One of those islands was Dhangethi, which is a popular stopover for liveaboards carrying divers and other tourists. Unlike many islands in the Maldives, Dhangethi is not a resort but rather is a home for the locals, and while it still has the usual souvenir shops found anywhere tourists go, it also has little streets with real homes and real people.

Here’s an old one from all the way back in August, 2008. Gwen and I took a trip to New Brunswick, Canada to see the Bay of Fundy and camp on Grand Manan Island. The island itself is a sort of geographic oddity – it’s part of Canada but situated closer to the coast of Maine than New Brunswick. The island itself feels remote – it takes a lengthy ferry ride to visit, and there are not a lot of people once you get there. On the other hand, the beauty of the sea crashing against the island cliffs makes the experience entirely worthwhile.

I have so many fond memories of watching sunsets on the west coast, and I always try to catch them whenever I can. There’s something magical about seeing the sun drop down and then disappear below a wall of waves – giving a final valedictory glow to the continent before darkness. When I visited Carmel-by-the-Sea last month, I knew I wanted to catch that same experience with a photo from the beach.

One of the things about traveling to Sydney from New York is that the jet lag will wake you up early. The time difference is 10 hours ahead, tomorrow, which more or less means that you want to be awake when everyone else is asleep and vice-versa. While this can be incredibly annoying, it does have the one benefit of making it easy to plan for sunrise photos. If I’m going to be wide awake anyway, I might as well capture something special. So it was with this in mind that I started looking for a place to go and see the world wake up.