Sharing A Little Bit More

Manu Design Studio's Blue Velvet kit needed to take the center stage.  Paired with a very old photo of me at (I think) 3 years old.  From the time I spent living with my Aunt Bev.  The curls are NOT natural. But the blonde totally is!

 From Tami Miller Designs - a collab kit with Aimee Harrison called Family is Forever.  A photo of my family at Ocean City NJ in August. 

Also from Tami Miller Designs, the Grateful Hearts collection.  This was also taken at the shore, but includes our +2 boys, Andrew and Kyle, who are quickly becoming part of the family.

And yes, this is the extent of my creativity lately.  I haven't had the time or inclination to log into Lifebook in the last three months.  Hoping to get past that soon as I'm already signed up for Lifebook 2019 and I'm missing my paints and getting messy.  But these pages are making me happy too!
How's your creative life these days???

A Fish Tale

Public Service Announcement:  I reformat my SD card every time I download photos to my computer. After our trip to Ocean City, I accidentally did the reformat before I had downloaded the photos. I was so angry with myself. All those precious photos gone! Today I decided to google it to see if there was any way to retrieve them - a $39.95 software download from a company called Card Recovery and a few quick steps later - all those precious photos are back!  Just in case any of you ever accidentally reformat your SD card...

And now, on to my Fish Tale...

On the first morning at Ocean City, Deanna and I were up and out the door by 6:30 a.m., expensive cameras in hand (my Canon 60D, her Nikon), to walk the beach and take photos.  We didn't make it far when a woman called out that if we wanted a good photo opp there was a stingray stranded by the jetty.

First you have to understand that Deanna will tell you she likes animals more than people.  And she's a nurse, so she has a lot of sympathy for injured creatures.  And she's a scuba diver - she has been swimming with sharks and stingrays before. So she was a bit incensed that this woman was suggesting that a stranded fish was a good photo opp.

We walked over to the jetty where 3 or 4 people were milling around getting photos of the stingray and chasing it into even further shallows than it was already in. Nobody was making any attempt to save the poor thing.  We could immediately see that it had been scraped up quite a bit from being buffeted against the rocks. And it had no way to get back to the ocean as the tide had gone out, leaving bits of sand bars where there wasn't enough water for it to get over.

Deanna suggested we start from the other direction and walk behind it to force it back toward the ocean. So Deanna and I started shuffling through shin deep water and the stingray started moving back in the proper direction. Until we hit the first sand bar and the stingray wanted to turn around. The only way to keep it moving in the right direction was to literally push its fins over the sand bar. Deanna was holding the tail so it wouldn't sting.

This was at about the half-way point of the jetty and the first area where the water was too shallow to allow forward movement.  After the first few pushes, pink shirt lady jumped in to help (up til then she had just been taking photos).

I was juggling two expensive cameras and carrying my flip flops and Deanna's shoes, so I stepped back for a minute to get these shots.

 It was at this point that older guy on a bike stops by and says "Are you herding a stingray?"  Well yes, if we don't get it out of these shallows it will die.  And someone behind us says "Aren't you worried about getting stung?"  Um YES, but that is why every time we have to touch it Deanna is holding the tail!

And then bike guy wants to know aren't we worried about the cameras?  Well yes.  But we still want to help this poor creature. You know, priorities.  Once we got past this jutting out rock, pink shirt and bike guy stepped back and Deanna and I continued to herd and lift.  See how far up the next group of sticking out rocks is???

Well, it was when we finally got the sting ray that far that the water was deep enough for it to swim around the end of the jetty and out into the open ocean.  It took awhile before the poor thing was able to swim past the breaking waves. I imagine it was exhausted from being chased around the shallows of the jetty by camera wielding humans.  (I think the blobs in the foreground of several of these photos are my flip flops... too much stuff in my hands!!)

So that is how we began an amazing day at the shore. I actually touched a wild stingray! More than once!

Scavenger Hunt - 5 - July LinkUp Post

I'm participating in Rinda's 2013 Summertime Photography Scavenger Hunt.  Today she is hosting a link-up so if you want to see what others have been posting in response to the prompts, you can head over there!

Here are my finds for this post:

#19 - A Fisherman.  I watched this guy cut bait, throwing the heads and guts to the seagulls and got photos of the seagulls swooping in to swipe the goods.  I didn't hang around to see if he actually caught anything.

#13 - a Fence.  These fences all along the beach are only there to keep people off the dunes. Because the dunes are there to protect the town from storm surge, so we don't want people trampling them and inhibiting the vegetation growth. Hurricane Sandy wiped out all of the dunes in Ocean City last year and they had to be rebuilt, which is why these fences look new and not weathered. The town did a fantastic job of clean-up and rebuild after the storm!

Bonus Item: A person wearing an outfit that symbolizes your country.  How about all these men in military dress?  This is from the Nights in Venice Boat Parade.

#8 - A Tower.  The Cape May Light House.  It took me several shots to get that sun flare positioned just right, but I love the results!

#5 - A Sunset.  We took a dolphin watching sunset cruise from Cape May one evening. The weather cooperated and we DID see dolphins (or at  least we saw dorsal fins and flukes). In the wild the dolphins don't jump and do tricks, so getting photos of them was nearly impossible. But the sun was setting just as we were pulling back into the harbor, so I was able to snag a few sunset shots!

I couldn't decide between these two sunset photos.  Do you have a preference?

#9 - Something out of place.  When you are boating along the shore of Cape May, you'll see lots of beautifully restored Victorian era homes and hotels.  You don't expect to see this - a WWII concrete bunker. Especially when you don't think of WWII as having been fought along the shores of the eastern United States.  When originally built the bunker was 900 feet inland.  Over the years, the shoreline eroded to the point where the bunker was completely surrounded by water.  Around 2004, the shoreline was rebuilt and the bunker remains.  Sure looks odd though!

#10 - Outside Bench.  These benches sit along eight full blocks of boardwalk in Ocean City.

and almost every one of them has a plaque like this - dedicated to, in memory of, etc. - all with different names and sayings.

#6 - Someone napping.  This shot was taken at 7:00 a.m. on a fairly deserted beach. From a distance I thought this was just a pile of beach towels left behind. It was only when I got closer that I recognized these lumps as people.  And these two were totally out!  They didn't move or stir even with the trucks driving along the beach cleaning up debris and trash.  It appears they may have spent the night on the beach - which is not a typical sight given that Ocean City is a dry town.  But hey, if you are going to sleep on a public beach, I figure you are fair game for my scavenger hunt shots!

You can see my other Scavenger Hunt shots here:  Post 1,  Post 2,  Post 3,  Post 4

More From The Shore

As I said in my last post, I walked the beach almost every morning, camera in hand. Being out early gave me lots of opportunity for solitude - it was my form of meditation for the week.

Some mornings were very cloudy and overcast. Others sunny and bright. On this particular morning I had a bit of both and some sprinkles thrown in just for fun...

 Looking towards the north end of the beach, I watched the sun rising and finally breaking through the clouds.

It is amazing how much the color changes based on the presence or absence of the sun! 

Being at the shore always reminds me how vast and wondrous our planet really is. The Internet can sometimes make the world seem smaller with friends across vast oceans available to us with a few keystrokes.  But here... you can't count the grains of sand in a small bucket much less the entire beach... you can't count the drops of water in a bottle and here is an entire ocean... and somewhere way beyond where I can see, out past the horizon line, way farther away than I could ever swim... are friends I've made but haven't met in person yet.  And that same sun that is now shining down on me, graced them several hours ago.

 When I looked to the sound end of the beach, I watched this incredible rainbow being formed right before my eyes.

It almost looked like it was dripping rainbow down onto the 14th St. Fishing Pier.

And when it finally came out fully, I couldn't get back far enough to capture the entire thing from end to end. As deserted as the beach was at that time of morning, I almost felt like it was a private show that Mother Nature was putting on just for me!

So there I stood, head swiveling back and forth like I was watching a tennis match, trying to figure out which way to look and when to capture the moment. And it was glorious.

Hello Monday/4

Hello Ocean City N.J.! It's so good to be back.

Hello sun, sand, and sea.


Hello sunburn.  Yes, already. Just one arm that I didn't manage to keep in the shade yesterday!

Hello Manco & Manco pizza. That alone is worth the drive to the shore!

Hello books.  Free time to read as I wish feels so decadent.

Hello relaxation.  It's only Monday and I'm already wishing we had more than just one week...