Flagler Beach at Night

I think it was Monday when we had a full moon. And I’m telling you – it’s getting pretty weird out there because it seems that every time I look up at a clear sky, the moon is full again. It’s tugging at my psyche.

It started back when we were living in Connecticut. Every time I’d drive home from Jiu-Jitsu class, I’d see the same full moon floating right above the horizon. It was on Rt.85, just on the Hebron/Glastonbury border. I’d climb the hill, pass the farm, start descending the hill again and there it was. Perhaps I just didn’t notice it any other time. But for the sheer number of full moon pictures we’ve taken over the last year, I’d say that it’s been a lot more than any other time I can remember.

Living near the beach offers a rare opportunity for visits any time you wish. We’ve actually only been to the beach here a handful of times. We’re not necessarily sun people, so if you take those hours out of the equation, we’re left with evening, night and early morning. And evening and night are really the only realistic times we’d go. Just the word morning makes me tired. But that may be because I end up falling asleep later than 2am regularly. How that happened – don’t ask.

Anyway, we recently heard that there was going to be yet another full moon this past week. It was supposed to be closer to the earth than it’s been in a while. I figured that since we’re here and since the whole moon thing was happening, we should at least get out there to test our night photography skills. Of which we have none. I think setting the knob to “auto” is about as far as it goes for me. For her, she read a few tips online that were supposed to help.

Around 10pm, I walked out to the road to see if the moon was over the beach. It was, which was good news for the type of pictures I was interested in taking. Down at Flagler Beach, there’s a big pier that can be quite dramatic if positioned correctly. But again, since we really have no night photography experience, I wasn’t sure how things would turn out with the dark, a very bright light and distance. From what I do have experience with at times like this, I’ve found that getting a good focus is the greatest challenge. Auto-focus is almost useless and trying to look through that little viewfinder is almost as bad. The camera I have has a nice enlarge feature, where it brings the scene extremely close up, so things can be made crisper.

We took about 200 photos and tossed about 160 of them. They were crooked, blurry, too far, too close – you name it. But from the ones we saved, I’d say they were decent. Not great, but good enough to say that we went on a short photography outing at the beach at midnight. That’s good enough for me.

Since so many of the shots are very close together in theme, I’m only going to post a few here. But remember, it was around midnight when we took them. Strange how much the cameras brightened things up.