Washington State - Ferry Ride to San Juan Islands - Seaside Houses

Well, it's been since March since I've posted - simply ran dry on travel and, to an extent, creativity.  The Writers Block of the photography world, so to speak.  So here we are...

Getting back into it reminded me of something about creativity.  As in any of the gifts we are given, such as they may be, sustaining creativity requires exercise.  And when one doesn't exercise, what happens?  Yes, ATROPHY.  One doesn't realize until the later stages that when you're not growing you're going the other way, and you have to start from wherever that may be to regain what was diminished or lost.  Sometimes this means reviewing and relearning skills that once seemed easy, but that were acquired perhaps over a substantial period of time.  This is where I found myself when we traveled recently to Washington State.  My wife expressed an interest in going to the San Juan Islands and there was a wedding to attend in Seattle, so we found our opportunity.  I dusted off the Bigger Cahoona and we re-entered our exercise routine on trips with the family.

I was actually a little nervous.  Do I still have the eye to quickly compose a shot?  Will I have command and control of the buttons and dials on the camera enough to take technically good photographs?  And, more fundamentally, will I even see the beauty and interest around us enough to even want to capture and share with the world?  All of these questions hummed in the back of my mind as we departed on our journey.

As it turns out, it did take a while to re-stir the creative juices and get myself in a place where lifting the camera to snap pictures became a reflex rather than a chore.  I had atrophied some.  Once that was awakened, I found that I'd lost my bearings on exposure compensation, so resorted to a 5-shot bracket instead of the usual 3.  This helped.  Happily, after a few days I found myself seeing pictures to be taken just about every time I turned my head.  I was in the saddle again.

Which brings us to the next step.  I'd forgotten how much fun it is to work with the pics in Photoshop after returning home, and thoroughly enjoyed the post-capture work necessary to turn an average into perhaps a better-than-average picture.  And now enough of them are done to begin posting (and writing) again.

The pic above was taken from the ferry ride to San Juan Island from Anacortes, WA.  It was dusk and the light was fading fast, but I did manage to get a couple of keepers, including this one.