Living on an island, wait…, let me rephrase that, living on a peninsula of the largest island on the Pacific coast of North America there are plenty of opportunities to create beautiful seascapes. I am rarely ever more than a couple of kilometres from the water at any given time of the day here where I live on Vancouver Island.
To view, the Seascapes gallery click on the above photo or this link. https://paulkerins.com/seascapes/
There was a time when I actually preferred the mountains over the ocean. As I got older my opinion had started to shift. In the mountains, you have trees, trees that give you much-needed shade on hot days. I was never much of a beach-goer, I never understood the appeal of lying on a hot beach with the even hotter sun beating down on you while cooking yourself. Ding! Okay…, that side is done, turn yourself over and cook the other side now. Nope, not for me, my Irish ethnicity would never allow that.
I like the mountains and the ocean both equally now, but I still won’t go to the beach in the middle of a scorching day. I prefer to go to the ocean-side very early or late in the day, or on an overcast or rainy day, I especially like going to the beach during the winter months. These are the best times to photograph seascapes. There are more interesting colours, the light can be more dramatic and there are generally fewer people about as well, which makes for more opportunities to create better photographs.
When I was young I loved skiing and camping, I would go every chance I had. This is where my love of the mountains began, the cool fresh air, the smell of the evergreen trees, being completely surrounded by nature. I always appreciated the ocean, but I never got into any water sports, or any kind of beach culture when I was young, so it was always something that did not really resonate with me.
So what changed my mind, why do I like both the mountains and the ocean equally now? Well, since you are on a photographer’s website the answer might be shocking, so make sure you are sitting down and brace yourself for the answer, are you ready? It was photography that made me love the ocean more than before. Are you shocked? I know…, right? I am as shocked as you are.
Funnily enough, it was not the seascape photography per se that did it, it was doing photography productions at the beach that did it. Shooting fashion and beauty productions for many different magazines and commercial clients over the years as well as doing portraits for my private clients that made me realize how much I’ve come to appreciate the ocean not just as a background to my portraits, but as the main subject as well.
The light and colours in seascape photography are like the ocean’s waters constantly shifting, constantly changing right before my eyes. The horizon line in seascape photography can make for clean, simple, and graphic images which naturally draws your eye to the subject matter within the photograph. The massiveness of the ocean allows for a very large negative space within the photographs giving you the viewer a true sense of scale. So yeah, photographically speaking what’s not to love?
Thank you for visiting my website and viewing the Seascapes gallery, be sure to visit my blog again soon to see the next gallery that I will upload soon.