Ben
Peter
I haven't met this surfer yet.
I was photographing this young boy playing in the surf, but I was intrigued by the man. I guessed he was the boy's grandfather, but I didn't know for sure. The man stood sternly and silently on the beach keeping watch over the boy, who was enthusiastically running in and out of the water. There was scarcely any additional interaction between the two of them.
The dinghies at West Falmouth Harbor.
I'm reading a new book on street photography by Valerie Jardin and I was happy to discover that the author, like me, doesn't think you have to be taking pictures on a street to make it street photography. The photographs can also be taken on a beach. Ms. Jardin says that street photography has to do with people, or, and I like this, the "idea of people." So, the first four photographs in this series are clearly of people, but the photograph of the dinghies conveys the idea of people.
I like the documentary nature of candid photographs taken of people on the beach. I can imagine looking at these photographs years from now and wondering who the people were? Where have they gone? What has happened in their lives since this brief moment captured as a digital image by my camera? Maybe that all sounds a bit creepy? But it is interesting, don't you think, to make up stories about strangers in photographs, especially if the photographs are old? So, does it matter if the photographs have been manipulated?
I've lamented the problem of backlighting when photographing the kite surfers at Chapoquoit. The beach faces west and the afternoon sun makes it difficult to get anything but silhouettes with an over-exposed sky in the background. I've tried using polarizing filters and graduated neutral density filters but with no success. In these images I've used photographic editing software to address the problem of silhouetted surfers with a flat grey sky behind them. I took photographs of the sky and then used my computer to make composite images by replacing the featureless grey sky behind the surfers with a different, properly exposed, image of the sky. Is that cheating? Some people think it is, but I disagree. It's an image, and I'm creating the image to tell the story I want to tell. So, it seems perfectly reasonable to make the sky look more interesting. We live in an era of "alternative facts."
Monte