“Beach Days”
Good Harbor Beach
Gloucester, MA
August, 2014
PENTAX K1000
Fuji Film Superia X-TRA400
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This post is coming to you live from the broken heat and shattered dreams of my frigid old house. I’m being so dramatic about it, but you understand. Brrrrr. I’ve got the space heater mere inches away from me blasting out as much heat as it dares to give + these photos are a good distraction to the cold.
Good Harbor Beach is our old stand-by. Unless we’re feeling up for something new {which we’re usually not!} we head up to Good Harbor, our favorite of all the beaches on the North Shore. Everyone around here has their favorite– Singing Beach, Wingaersheek, or even Crane’s Beach {if you can deal with the Black Heads! AHh!} and they are all completely gorgeous in their own special way, but Good Harbor Beach is where it’s at for us. Every single summer it wins.
We know where to park without having to pay and where we like to sit in the soft sand. I love being able to walk the length of the beach and when I’m up for it, taking the trek through the low waves on the sand bar out to Salt Island when it’s low tide. The views are also my favorite which is probably why I have hundreds and HUNDREDS of landscape photos from over the years. It’s the same each year, the same each visit and yet, I continue to jam-pack my iphone with photos of this place. It’s just so pretty.
This particular trip was a challenge for me because with the Pentax you cannot go wild with the click. If you do, you’ll run out of film and you’ll surely be sorry. On this day I had to take my time and think about each frame that I was capturing— the sea of people you see when you first get to the footbridge, the gorgeous old house up on the hill, my sister and our friend Jordan walking out to the water, and the way the sand looks like glass at low tide… each photo has a lot of thought that goes into it, at least I tried to put thought into each one, and still I only came out with a few that I really loved. But then again, that’s the beauty of photography, you know?
Even if I just get one good one it’s enough. I captured that moment. That moment is mine.
I’m like that when I go to Jekyll Island with my parents in the summer. Same island, but much changes every year, but it has a different texture than, say, North Myrtle where we usually go. It’s moreso the retirement island for Georgians, but with a touch of Hemingway here and there. I really want to write a story set there one day, but I haven’t figured out the details of it yet. I just think it would be a cool setting. And I can empathize with being more precious with your photos on that kind of camera. It can be easy to just click through picture after picture on your DSLR without taking as much care.