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"...at night alone"
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the future.
- Walt Whitman
Autumn is not what one normally considers "beach weather," particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Nonetheless, the autumn months offer one advantage over summer, at least for the photographer: clear days don't lead to late-afternoon fog the way they all-too-often do in summer. If your point at being on the coast is photography rather than sunbathing, the fall months can provide the best conditions for sunset images.
Or so I hoped, when a day with a promise of mostly-clear skies sent me to Second Beach on the Quillayute tribal lands. Unfortunately, while fog was absent, so were the promised light clouds, meaning that sunset took place under a relentlessly-clear sky. Not bad, certainly, but nowhere near as interesting as a few light-catching clouds would have made it.
However, if there's one thing I've learned, it's to stick around after sunset and capture the "blue hour"; that time where it may seem almost dark to us, but where the camera, given multi-second exposure times, is able to capture colors too dim for the human eye.
As the twilight grew deeper, an added bonus appeared: the near-full moon illuminating the foreground, even as stars appeared in the sky.
By this point, I was "shooting blind," as virtually nothing but electronic noise could be seen in "live view"; however, the camera itself was finding more than enough light to record a detailed image, given a long-enough exposure.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
- Walt Whitman
17 replies
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The sun, in that first shot, wow, just wow. 
You are so talented, I'm honored I've had the chance the shoot your beautiful state with you. 
