Summer!

Ah, my favorite time of the year, Summer.

Since today is the first day of Summer, I figured it deserved a post of its own.

The photo above was taken years ago at Point Pleasant Beach, NJ. We took the hour+ drive in the pre-dawn darkness to be on the sand when the sun came up. It's amazing how cold it is on the beach before dawn, even in late August. We brought some food for ourselves because we knew it would be a long, early morning, but when the sun came up we noticed the seagulls flocking to our box of crackers.



"Hey, let's toss some around and see if we can catch them in flight!" was my first thought. I snapped many photos, but this was the closest one to perfect that I got. To this day it's still one of my favorite nature shots. I've gone on a lot of trips, recorded a lot of pixels of pretty things and impressive locations, but the silhouette of 2 birds crossing the sun as it rises over the water, to me, just feels right

Here is another shot from that morning. We weren't the only ones on the beach admiring the sun, and this man happened to be walking by. I didn't want to make it obvious that I was trying to capture his image, so I waited until he got a little further away and grabbed this poignant shot:




There is also this shot, where I tried to emulate the one up top. The result is a little different, because I used a longer lens. The giant white ball is the orb or the sun, completely blown out from how bright it was. Amazingly, you can see right through the nostril hole of the bird!





If you like any of these, I have them, as well as a few other shots, available for sale as prints in my Nature & Wildlife gallery.

Thanks for reading and looking at the photos. If you want to learn more about my work, keep an eye on the blog, or visit me on Facebook for daily updates.

More soon,
-Rob