Until COVID came along and disrupted global travel, I would usually take a business trip to Seattle about once per quarter. The weather in Seattle can be notoriously hit and miss, and on many of these trips I would often have trouble getting both good light and a free schedule at the same time. Frustrated after a few trips where I had brought my camera and gotten nothing, I nearly left it behind on my trip last June. But I sensed something in the weather forecast that one evening might be nice, and my calendar looked free from a distance. So I took my camera along, and nearly missed the critical time window anyway.
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.
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.
