Sunday, August 22, 2010

Vacations for me have usually just been time away from work.  But, every year, if we're lucky and if only for a few days, we spend some time in a special place that's memorable.  My trip to Jacksonville this summer was enriched by several days at a hotel at the ocean...and I mean AT THE OCEAN!! ... as in fronting on the beach.  I couldn't get enough of it. I'd get up in the middle of the night and go to the slider to the deck and just stare at whatever was out there. We never closed the drape (3rd floor room made privacy possible) and never stopped staring out on the ocean when we weren't actually walking on the beach or flopping around in the water.  So, not surprisingly, here are a couple of photographs from that balcony of a morning sunrise.  I had to wait for quite a while for the camera to adapt to the warm, humid air from having spent the night in the air conditioned dryer air of our room, but that wasn't a problem. Coffee, and a magnificent view made the wait not only tolerable, but a real pleasure.

Friday, August 13, 2010

It's really nice to get back here after a couple of months hiatus.  My cello work during July consumed the entire weekday, and I was utterly disinterested in anything but prodigious laziness on the weekends.  That means that I had not exposed a single frame of film for quite a while.  But, my brief annual sojourn to Florida last week was energizing enough to finally do some work with the camera.

The Florida landscape is so enormously different than that of the Hudson Valley that I won't really begin to know what's significant from what's just novel to me until I have lived there eventually in retirement for a while.  Still, live oaks, moss, and palmettos are visually so seductive that I couldn't resist.  I may look back on these images some years from now and wonder why I bothered with what then will be a commonplace subject, but for now, I can't get enough of this stuff.