N 36° 3’59.06″ W 75°41’23.29″ Google Earth location
Another where it doesn’t matter a whole lot where you are, but it represents something that I thought I’d accomplish more often in the intervening years. Bear with me for a second.
When I determined that I’d have 53 Tripod Holes posts this year and that the last would fall on December 31st, I slotted this image in for it – not because it was taken on that date, far from it, but because I’d taken another memorable frame on that date, of my nieces, in the same location, some years later. It’s stupid, I know, but we could also use the reminder of summer right now.
Best guess is summer of 1994, one of my first weekend trips out to the beach to chase photos – still using an Olympus OM-10 at that time, still using print film. Up well before sunrise to catch it over the ocean, and I chose the beach access that I knew would be almost devoid of (other) tourists at that time, up right alongside the Black Pelican restaurant in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. There was a bit too much haze on the horizon to see the sun break directly over the water, so I watched it start to appear through the haze, and was lined up, camera on tripod, ready to catch a silhouette of one of the many seagulls and pelicans, should one pass directly across the sun. It never happened, but this one was close enough, and happenstance meant that I caught it with its wings on the upstroke, where they look best. I didn’t really know this at the time – I just tripped the shutter as the bird came into position – but on seeing the print later, I was very pleased. It decorated my walls for years, and still remains in the website gallery.
Catching something silhouetted against the sun or the moon is a hell of a lot trickier than you might suspect. Both are terribly small in the sky, so it’s easy for even a flock of birds to pass through the immediate area and never right in front of the sun/moon. This says nothing, of course, of things like planes or the ISS or something like that. I did eventually get a couple of silhouettes of that nature, but not what I was trying for here, nearly thirty years ago. Maybe this coming year is the one…
Happy New Year, everyone!