Working as a photographer for a newspaper, especially a weekly local news paper you often spend most of your time shooting grip and grins. You know the posed group photos of the womans club or the scholarship recipients. It is obvious that these photos are important for a local paper to give recognition to the people in the community but they do nothing for a photographers need to be creative.

The photo above is what made me think of this and reminded me why I got into photography to begin with. I remember seeing photos like this in books and thinking how cool it was that it looked like a painting, having no idea how it was done it seemed almost magical, I wished I could make photos like this. Now 10 years later as I squatted on the beach behind my tripod to set up this shot it all seemed so easy I knew I wanted as long a shutter speed as I could get so almost without thinking I set the camera to f 22 and ISO 50, leveled the horizon and hit the remote trigger. Click, and there it was the picture I saw in my head as I pulled into the parking lot of Surf Drive beach. I take hundreds of photos a week but for some reason this photo felt like the culmination of years of learning and practice rolled up into literally a 5 minute detour on the way back to the office.