National Geographic: Your Shot

Calling Out
Nauset Light Beach, Eastham, Massachusetts

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Swell : 08.29.2013

[Above] Swell
I found this on the wrist-mounted GoPro I was wearing during last week's shark dive. I took this image while sitting in the open stern door waiting to drop into the cage. You can see the swell at image left. Seas were building all day with occasional rollers with troughs so deep, there was no horizon.

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Beam : 08.30.2013

[Above] Beam
Late night light painting experiments on Nauset Light Beach, Eastham, Massachusetts.

As we were running around the beach with red LEDs, to our south, someone was launching sky lanterns. Each would float off into the moonlight as their amber glow would remain visible for miles. Further down the beach, someone was shooting a high intensity green laser into the Milky Way as if attempting communication with something real or imagined.

The totality of the scene must have looked crazy from the observation deck just below the lighthouse. While staring out at the ocean at night, darkness hides the details, only electric lights in the distance suggest another human.

We shot at high tide, and the beach break would explode out of the darkness at 10 second intervals as the beam from Nauset Light would sweep overhead.

Nothing like the solitude of a beach at night. It provided quite a contrast to the chaos and push of Route 6 during peak hour.

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Fire Portrait : 08.27.2013

[Above] Fire Portrait : 08.27.2013
Nauset Light Beach
Eastham, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

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Nauset Fog

[Above] Surfer in Nauset Fog
Nauset Light Beach, Eastham, Massachusetts

I love the creepy, socked in mornings along the Cape Cod coast. The fog makes the cement colored water look all the more foreboding. The line ups are virtually empty. If you want some water time, you have to have the dedication and a hearty appetite for ice cream headaches.

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New England Sand

Nothing like New England sand.

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© 2009 John Bulmer Photography | Revolution 7 Creative | Throwing Pixels

Nauset Light Beach Longboarder

[Above] Collage, Nauset Light Beach Surf Images

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© 2009 John Bulmer Photography | Revolution 7 Creative | Throwing Pixels

The Mysterious Chemistry of Twilight

[Above] The Mysterious Chemistry of Twilight
Sunset behind Provincetown from the Truro shoreline.
Truro. Massachusetts

No, the name isn’t a lyric from an Emo song.

“The Mysterious Chemistry of Twilight” is a line from the audio book we listened to on the drive to the Cape this past weekend. I liked the flow of the words and set out to take a photo to match the phrase. As the sun set behind Provincetown, I set up in a tidal flat for this exposure.

The Cape feels decidedly different in the off season. The lines have evaporated and the quaint shops of P-Town have either closed early or shut down for the season, leaving thank you signs in empty windows promising to “see you in April.” The shore in the off season is very appealing.

The last time I was in Las Vegas, I visited Peter Lik’s gallery in Cesar’s Palace. I have long been a huge fan of Peter’s work, and seeing his work in person was a must. His gallery is filled with amazing, large format landscapes printed with metallic pigments. The photos are mounted with track lighting with dimmers. As the display lights are dimmed, different wavelengths of light react with the metallic pigments in the photos. The result is a truly dynamic image that seems to change in hue and intensity in much the same way the sunset changes the colors of the land and sky. The effect is a 2 dimensional living landscape.

“The Mysterious Chemistry of Twilight” is 63 inches wide. Tonight, I am in the process of preparing the CMYK production file for metallic printing. This will be the first image I mount with optical lights and dimmers. If successful, I plan on constructing custom frames with built in lighting for my large metallic print offerings.

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Warm Cars Are Better Than Cold Hands

[Left] Gear Box
Truro, Massachusetts

Just back from a weekend on the Cape. The early morning weather was cold along the coast. Monday, at Race Point at 5am, the air temperature was 38 degrees backed by a 30 knot onshore wind. Standing on the observation deck over the beach, the open Atlantic was streaked white with crescents of white water. The weather was so cold, that it beat me back to the warm car within ten minutes. Ungloved hands on cold tripod legs knot up quickly.

I was hoping to shoot some star trail photos of Pilgrim Monument and the Provincetown skyline, but the weather and atmospheric conditions didn’t cooperate. Personally, I didn’t have the fortitude to stand on the shore for a few hours photographing the arc of the constellations as the planet revolved on its axis. The fireplace was far too tempting.

Above is the compliment of photo gear I brought along for the weekend*. Personally, I love lugging Pelican boxes through hotel lobbies. The sight of the ABS plastic cases is always a catalyst for conservation. More than once I have been asked if I am a scientist on a research project. The temptation is always there to concoct wild stories about the contents of the cases. But I don’t.

* Old school tripods for exposure to salt water and sand.

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Nauset Light Cross Processed

[Left]
Nauset Light
Eastham,
Massachusetts
Cross Processed E6 in C41

August was the last time we were on the Cape. The days were cool and the nights were cold. The summer's humidity dome had collapsed a few weeks before. Now, the warm weather is gone and I feel cheated. This is the first year without 90 degree beach days along the Atlantic.

Going back to Truro soon. The sky has changed color with the change of seasons. I have some medium format star trail photos planned, weather permitting.

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Mascara

[Left] Surfer's Memorial
Newcomb Hollow Beach,
Wellfleet, Massachusetts

Cold day on the New England coast. Rain and white water above the high tide line. The ocean coughs up strange objects of unknown origin: a green and white flip flop, a blue barrel, remnants of a commercial fishing net, a toy horse, a few feet of yellow nylon rope, wood of various sizes, and a Sherman Williams painter's cap. Empty beach parking lots mean all the tourists are down cape at the mall. Makeshift memorial stuck in the sand for an unknown surfer.

The rain blurs the words the way mascara runs with tears.

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House at Coast Guard Beach

[Left] House at Coast Guard Beach
Eastham,
Massachusetts

This hundred year old Coast Guard house overlooks the open Atlantic. Its beams have weathered some of the worst weather on the east coast, including the devastating Blizzard of '78 (a stormfront so powerful, it sucked Henry Beston's famed Outermost House out to sea.) This image was shot digitally for a design project promoting a fundraising initiative for the preservation of historical architecture on the Cape.

The days are getting shorter, but the temperatures are still in the mid 70's with 90% humidity. I have a few cycling related projects planned this week. Tonight, I am researching cyclocross races across New England. I love the battlefield vibe of a good cross race on a wet day. Images of muddy winter courses have changed little since the races of 1940's Belgium. Getting some epic cross photos is definitely on my tick list for winter.

There are nothing commercially available for mounting cameras to bikes, kayaks, snowboards, or any other unstable moving object. I have been building camera mounts for years from cannibalized tripods, climbing gear, neoprene, and stainless steel hardware from Home Depot. Over the years, I have accumulated an entire self of bombproof mounting options for bikes and snowboards. I started building prototypes in the mid 1990's from small plastic Ultrapods, frame pump mounts, cork bar tape, and Blackburn bottle cages. Attaching a camera housing to the downtube of a mountain bike isn't exactly a new concept, but every year I feel the need to make my contribution to the collective body of extreme angle cycling photos. The shortened days and rapidly degrading color pallet of the landscape give this project an increased sense of urgency. The gray landscape of winter in the Northeast is quickly approaching.

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Observation Deck

[Left] Tidal Pool
Nauset Light Beach
Eastham, Massachusetts

The warm weather arrives as swarms of tourists descend on the Bourne rotary. The locals look toward the summer invasion with mixed emotions. A simple equation: the revenue is needed, but the sudden population boom makes life harder. The increase in summer residents increases everything. Gas prices rise, lines at the Ben and Jerry’s snake out the door, beaches fill up at 10am. You can’t have paradise without the infusion of outside capital. The summer may seem chaotic, but for year-rounders, there is precision in the absurdity.

People measure life here by summer seasons.
The seasons come and go as do the traffic jams and rear end collisions along Route 6. The summer is invaded with interlopers in minivans with cargo carriers, endless, black SUV’s and BMW’s up from Boston. For the locals, it is the price of living here.

The Cape depends on the countless people who travel here every year with hopes of a few days of a life less ordinary. Kids mug for one time use cameras. Vacation memories to be stored, undeveloped, in a small 24 exposure cardboard container. Oversized beach umbrellas bloom like flowers in the mid morning heat. There is a delicious sense of rebellion in being at the beach at 10am on a Wednesday. Where would you be right now? Staring at a computer? Having the same conversations about the same obvious observations? Discussing morning traffic over paper cups of coffee service coffee?

Roadside ice cream stands burn bright under bent neon. Up in Provincetown, the lots are all full and Commercial Street is a sea of shoppers, people watchers, vendors, and drag queens. There is a sense of crowding and of limited space, but these are the memories that will endure into the winter, when there is no green and the daylight seeps out in mid afternoon. But for now, life is easy. Your desk is empty and you are still securely insulated in dislocation of a week away. Your time away is a precious commodity and there is still plenty to enjoy.

All over the cape, people feel the distance and space in different ways.
* At day’s end, a man stands on the observation deck above a national seashore beach. Slowly, he scans the horizon through binoculars looking for information in the blackout of the Atlantic. It is an opportunity to use his binoculars for something more exciting than trying to discern the make and model of the neighbor’s new TV set. He feels like the star of a National Geographic Special, like what he is doing is supremely important. The wind whips at the beach grass below the wooden platform and he thinks to himself how we would give almost anything to be capable of bottling the feeling of nights like this one. Behind him, the world could fall away and it wouldn't matter at all. Stores could cut the lights and close without notice, there could be breaking news of celebrity DWI's, the cable could be out, the network down, spam could be closing down the inbox with promises of something for nothing, but it wouldn’t matter. He would trade all the Monday nights wasted watching football for just one evening like this one, once a year. None of it matters right now. The ocean smells beautiful. He exhales in the same way, at day’s end, beach grass exhales moisture back into the air.

Soon the teeth of night will be upon the observation deck and that would be just fine. He could stand there all night, watching the colors change before eventually fading to a black that is impossible over the city where the light pollution muscles the stars out of the sky. But tonight, he could stand there and watch unattached lights moving in the darkness. Boats travel under the cover of night and there is a story attached to every deck light out past the white crescents of the breakers. Darkness and distance erase pattern or logic. He could stand there. Stand there until the cold beats him back. It is times just like now that are perfect for speculations that are often buried somewhere far below the day’s chores. It is perfectly O.K. to philosophize while standing on the edge of something as large as the Atlantic. For that brief instant, your place in the world is completely understood. Raising such questions in the over engineered confines of a Starbucks seem silly. But here, as the salt air whips around your legs, the moratorium on clichés [even this one] has been lifted. Live it to the fullest because you know, somewhere in the places in your mind that never seem to quiet down, not far from the surface, the knowledge that real life is waiting for you exerts a gentle pressure. You will be back chasing down actionable tasks soon enough. Paradigms need changing. Quotas need to be met. But for now, the world falls away, nothing exists outside the black framed circles of a pair of $200, waterproof, nitrogen filled, digital zoom binoculars.

* For an enhanced experience, please read the above aloud while at a coffee house while wearing a black sweater, oil paint splattered jeans, and a paste on goatee. A monotone beat generation drawl is strongly recommended. I wrote this after an evening's photo session on the Cape in 2005. Listening to Soul Coughing' s classic Screenwriter's Blues, I amped up the fake spoken word drama. I was sitting in the car at the edge of the Nauset Light Beach parking lot. Less than a hundred feet to the east, Nauset Light swept the horizon with light at regular intervals. A man dressed in that psuedo-safari gear and a Tilley hat stood at the edge of the observation deck staring out into the blackout over the Atlantic. Vacations bring out all the gear accumulated from a year's worth of trips to Eddie Bauer and L. L. Bean. After all these years I still can't explain why some men feel the need to look like Magnum PI while on vacation. I wondered if he was the typical, suburban American: 2 weeks vacation and hundreds of hours of overtime in order to keep a McMansion and 2 luxury SUV's afloat.

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Herring Cove Lifeguard Station

Tonight, I am in the process of reviewing images from the summer. It's the time of year when I make the determination what will be available as stock images on other sites, what I will keep for myself, and what I will file away in R7's vault for future design projects. The last decade has eroded the profession of graphic design. Today, it seems like everywhere I go I meet a fellow designer, or aspiring designer. [And I live in a small market] It also seems like there are a million shell companies on the web that amount to nothing more than a person with a computer and some spare time. I created R7 [Called Seven Ink back then] in 1993 and I pride myself on being able to offer original photography as well as progressive design. In many ways, photography has taken over R7's primary focus. Photography has yet to be eroded in the way design has. Anyone can buy a design application and use a template and produce something passable, but not everyone can go out and take a really successful photo. Until the technical barriers of photography are simplified and sold, I will take refuge with my cameras from the cliches of the design world.

Herring Cove Lifeguard Station is another favorite from summer 2007. We were on the Cape for a week in August when I shot this sunrise photo. I must have driven by scene thousands of times since I was a child, yet, I never considered exploring Herring Cove's possible images because of the proximity of Race Point and its 2 antique guard stations and secluded lighthouse without road access. I managed a few really good shots from that trip and this is one of them. This was our first real trip with our newborn, so, sleep came at a premium. Not realizing that my focus would be more directed at our newborn daughter than photography, I packed enough camera gear for a Himalayan expedition. I should have just brought a DSLR and a film SLR, lenses and a tripod, but I packed for every contingency. I always do. I even had intentions of shooting star trails surrounding Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown. Next time I will be more realistic.

Shooting this image is a great memory. The morning was warm and the roads were deserted. The world was inhabited by a few surf casters, neoprene surfers, shore birds and me. Looking at the image now, the architecture seems slightly old-world Cuban or maybe Caribbean. I especially love how the building seems nestled in the dune grass. This print is available up to 30 inches on metallic paper with custom reclaimed wood framing options.

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