A lot of my favorite photos I’ve made are from coastlines. It’s easy to see why they’re such a dominant part of landscape photography and painting. There’s a dynamism to ocean water: it moves onto the shore, it responds to the wind, its light changes in unpredictable ways in response to sky and clouds and human-created light sources. You can shoot long exposures and short ones and get interesting results either way. You can make the beach or the rocks the focus or have them be at the edges of the landscape. You can get lost in the vastness of the sea, in the gradient of the sky.
This was a shot that I did a lot of working with in post-processing and every time I open it in Lightroom I fiddle with it a bit, trying to give it even more of a melancholic, mysterious sense. It was part of a series of low-light, early day shots at Acadia National Park in Maine, where the rocks marvelously vary in shape and color (many pinkish, some blue-grey, others rising darkly out of churning surf). There was a woman sitting motionless for a long time just below me, so as I shot some medium-long exposures of the surf, she herself didn’t blur and I began to realize that she was the best thing about the shots I was taking in that direction.
I wish I’d understood while shooting what her compositional role was, because I’d have shifted the framing and camera position to put her over at the edge of the right third of the image (so moving camera a bit to the left of where it is here and shooting back towards the rocks jutting out into the surf). At the time I took this, I still didn’t really have a strong eye for composition and I struggle some with it still. (I also don’t have the hesitation that many genuinely skilled photographers do to crop shots to get what I see post-facto as a better composition than the in-camera shot.)