Beach Blog Post Revisited: Just Because I Want To

I had a session scheduled recently at the beach which is about fifty miles from our town and takes about an hour and ten minutes to drive to. For anyone that doesn't know already, I live in Florida so we have beaches on each side of us. After I had traveled about halfway to the session, I realized that there would probably be no session. We were driving directly into a huge storm that looked like it was directly over the beach. The session did end up rescheduled but since I had my kids and their friends with me, we decided to stay anyway and see what fun we could have when the storm let up.
The photo below shows exactly what got me thinking that my session would be cancelled.

Hmmmm . . . time to call my clients and see what is happening at the beach.

This place below should be familiar to anyone that has been to Crescent Beach from our town. It means that you have arrived! This particular photo was shot at 3:30 PM in the afternoon so you can see what kind of storm was going on.

I was so ready to photograph something--anything.

My sweet Brooke trying to see the beach through the pouring rain and lightning.

Lightning is the only exciting thing that happened for awhile but the kids did enjoy the goodies I had packed in a cooler while we waited.











My friend Alice sent me an email that I answered on my Blackberry right before I took the photo below. I laughed and told her that I was sitting in the middle of a storm taking photos on the beach.











I will have to include the photo below since it was a really funny part of our trip. It was just a small cottage that sat next to a gigantic oceanfront home that looked exactly like it. I loved it at first sight and knew that I had to turn around and get a picture of it. I turned around and planned out the traffic perfectly and set off to get the shot. I slowed up and was privately gloating that I had just enough time to get my shot before the traffic caught up to me. I stopped to set up the shot and realized that I was in complete manual focus and had only allowed time for automatic so I took the blurriest shot of my life and drove away. I stewed silently for about thirty seconds while the passengers in my car enjoyed it all too much. I then whipped the car around and decided that we were going to do it all again. I once again timed out the traffic perfecty and then stopped to shoot the picture. Just as I pushed the button on my camera--the door to the cottage flew open and a young man stepped out and stared at me. It was terrifying and I sped away as fast as possible. Anyway--it was just another day in my life of photography adventures but the kids sure it enjoyed it --- a lot!

I saw this place below under renovation and thought that if my friend Anna lived nearby that it would have been the perfect "persimmon" place to have her wedding reception. I love the driveway.

We ended up here which I highly recommend when you are near the Daytona area. All homemade ice cream and like 700% milk fat or something like that. The man told me and I am pretty sure that I tuned him out right away. The rainbow is real and was perfectly over the sign so I knew that God was promising no calories or fat at this location. Just kidding.

After the ice cream we drove back to the Ormond Beach area. I saw that the water had a pretty blue glow on it so we stopped again. Brooke and I walked down to the beach as it was getting dark. We had about ten minutes total before it was too dark for me to shoot. For anyone that owns a DSLR camera--you know that the light sensor in these cameras is large so even when it is dark or very dim, you can still get images. Most of the following images were done in very dim lighting. I even had one man walk by and ask me if I thought that anything would turn out since it was dark.

















I looked at these shells and wondered how many times they had been washed ashore and washed back out that day. It is amazing that every shell is not broken with all a shell goes through each day.





The beach is an amazing place to me. I will never grow tired or bored looking at it. I know that I could stare at the waves for hours and hours and still find so much to think about. Who in the world can look at it and not think of God? It is no wonder that so many people go there to think, pray, spend time with family and so many other special moments. I have driven to the beach several times in my life when I just needed to be alone and walk. I would walk and think, walk and pray and before I knew it I was once again captivated by all that God has created to look at.






. . . and then the beautiful day was over.

I know that this post was really long but the beach is a place that I love a lot and could not narrow down the pictures to just a few. Every picture is a little different and I love something about each of them. I am dedicating this post to my Dad and Mom who always seemed to pack up all of the kids when I was young and haul us to this very beach--often. We would stop on the way and get fried chicken, spend the day listening to the sounds of Marineland in the distance, I would laugh at the billboard sign for Coppertone that was beside Marineland all through my childhood and then when the day was done, my Dad would rinse all of our feet off with water that he had brought along. We even got to stop in Palatka on the way home at the Dairy Queen sometimes. These are really great memories to me.