I had another of a bummer sunrise photo failure today. I got up early enough to get to the ocean, drove the whole way there, it was 30 degrees out so I was wearing a winter jacket, no clouds to be seen the whole 40 minutes I was driving, I got to the beach and…
One band of clouds blocking the horizon. Clear skies everywhere else. Sunrise failure. Also, the tide was so far in that there was no beach. I had about a five foot wide area between the water line and the sea wall at the side of the road. It greatly reduced the potential photos, seriously.
I got a few nice pics, just nothing with the sun poking it’s big round head out of the water which is the whole point of these visits. I did eventually finish this month’s installment of the Frugal Film Project though. I just packaged up four rolls of film to ship off to the lab. That’s a good thing at least, even if the sunrise photos are duds.
I mean, could those clouds suck any more?
I might try again next Sunday. It will be Halloween after all.
I kicked off my Labor Day early this morning by driving out to the ocean and taking some sunrise pics. I went to Salisbury Beach on the Massachusetts side of the MA/NH state line and caught the actual sunrise. After that I drove over to Plum Island. I usually turn left when I cross the bridge onto the island and go to the lighthouse. This time I turned right and went to the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. There is a beach on the ocean there and hiking trails through the salt marshes just inland from the Atlantic.
There were a lot of people at Salisbury watching the sun. More than I’ve ever come across on one of these little trips. It was probably because the sun came up at 6:14am or so. The last time I did a sun rise visit I think the sun came up just after 5:00. Big difference. The only people on the Plum Island beach were a middle aged couple who were clearly on a date. I tried very hard not to draw attention to myself and thus distract them from what I’m sure was a lovely morning. The trails I walked on had a bunch of people too but they were all using binoculars while I was using cameras. They were bird watching.
I took some digital pics with my Z5, I took some 35mm with my N90, and I took some 120 with my Lubitell. I shipped the film out for developing today along with three rolls I shot in August. Will I get the scans back before we leave for California next weekend? Not likely, but I’ll chose optimism and say I hope so.
For now… digital pics.
We start with Salisbury Beach and the start of Labor Day 2026.
The Atlantic Ocean just before dawn
The waves were decent (the big ones were at Plum Island)
Almost time
Almost time
Good morning, everyone!
Nerd boy is about to get artsy with the pier
Fun with symmetry
Seagull photobomb
People. Sorry
Big waves on Plum Island Beach… well… big for the Atlantic at least
I was trying to get the waves as they rolled over. Success!
Crash
This view is from an overlook in the wildlife refuge
The whole trail was on a raised platform
And there we have it. My morning pics. The highlights of the digital pics at least. The full album is here on Flickr. When I get the scans back I’ll add them to the album. Hopefully I’ll have them by the end of the week so I don’t have to rely on a hotel’s wifi to upload them. Fingers crossed.
I went on an epic photographing journey today. I went to two locations and I walked something like four miles. Who even am I?
I paid for it with chores though. The cellar has been put back together after twice being blown off by a contractor. I won’t say it is “clean” but I will say it is drastically “cleaner” and that’s good enough for me. Speaking of contractors, yet another is scheduled to come by tomorrow to fix a piece of broken furniture in my step son’s room. Along with cleaning the cellar, I got everything ready for that too. Now it’s time to post some photos and then its time to nap.
I had a bunch on my photo to-do list this morning. One, shoot the sunrise (which required me getting out of bed at 4:00am and being on the road toward Hampton Beach, NH by 4:20… yikes!). Two put a roll of 35mm film through my new (to me) Nikon N90. Three, complete the Frugal Film Project for this month. Four, use the crap out of the 70–210mm zoom lens I got with the N90 on my Nikon Z5 via the FTZii adapter that I mistakenly called the F2Zii adapter in a post yesterday. Five, if possible finish off the roll of film in my Nikon FG-20 that’s been sitting there since March or so. In all five cases, mission accomplished.
I did not ship out the film for developing yet. I am planning on taking the N90 to my nephew’s high school graduation party next week (CONGRATULATIONS!!!!) and I might try to sneak in a second photowalk next Sunday too, if the weather cooperates. I’ll wait until after that to ship out the film. As usual, the day of blog post is only digital photos. Unlike all of my previous posts with images shot on my Z5, this one has a zoom lens. Not only a zoom lens, but a 70–210mm zoom lens!
First stop, Hampton Beach where the sky was completely clear and I saw the sun come out of the water. Success!
70mm
210mm. You can almost touch it!
I love how the sunrise lights up the windows
Dig that crazy star
The huge zoom let me steal a shot of this dude fishing. He was far away but the lens brought him close.
I drove up the coast a ways to get a different view. This time from way up a hill. The tide was so far out you had to walk half way to France to get to the water. It kinda took some of the granduer out of it for me. Oh well.
Rocks
Bike
Islands in the distance
210mm is kinda awesome
The next stop was the two Rail Trails in Newburyport, MA. One is called Clipper, I think, and the other is called Harbor… I think. The plan was to shoot film while walking away from the car, and then to shoot digital while walking back. So these first shorts are on the Harbor trail after I turned around. The sun reflecting off the water was kinda brutal. My Z5 and N90 both had fast enough shutter speeds to handle it, but my FG-20 and my Lomo Lubitell were struggling. I’m a tiny bit nervous about how some of those shots are going to turn out.
Zoomed way in on that little boat heading out to sea
See what I mean about the sun reflecting?
Boats, boats, boats!
Hey look, a lighthouse! I think it’s a restaurant
Water
The new lens managed some blurry background at f/4!
What do you call a boat like this? Is it a catamaran?
Today is Flag Day after all
The new lens managed some major blurry background at f/5.6! Wow!
How do you spell buoy?
Chairs
Steeple
Grass
More boats, boats, boats!
I took a lot of pictures of stairs for some reason
A little stroll through the woods
More blurry background
Bridge
Fence
Library books
And there you have it. A shit load of pointless pics that I had a lot of fun taking. The film version will come… someday… maybe.
I shot two full rolls of film. One 35mm and one 120. I also finished off the last few shots from an old roll of 35mm. I got them all developed and the scans came back the other day and last night I uploaded them all to Flickr and now it’s time for another post here.
Sort of. I am saving the 120 shots for another post. These are just 35mm pics. I’m also thinking of trying to sort of mirror the previous post. This plan probably won’t last for long, but let’s see.
The sunrise view sort of sucked, but I got a little glimpse of it. This is my Nikon FG-20 shooting my first ever roll of Lomography 800. I like the way the sun flares. At least the tiny bit of the sun we could actually see.
I think my plan to follow the first post is already dead… maybe not. I think this is from Salisbury Beach but I’m not sure. This is from my Pentax K1000 shooting Kentmere 400.
(note: on second look, I’m pretty sure this is Hampton Beach when the digital post was still at Salisbury Beach. Let’s not worry about that now though)
This next picture is crap, but speaking of sun flares! Woah!
Here’s one that I took on both film and digital. I can’t tell which is better. Maybe the film?
Another that I can’t tell whether it is better or worse than the digital version. This was with a 50mm lens and the digital was with an 85mm so the crop is different. Is crop the right word? I don’t think so.
The digital version of this is way better. Oh well.
Shooting black and white at the beach seems sort of silly, but I kinda dig it.
That moment when the sun came out… nice.
I thought maybe the light was better at this spot when I was shooting film than it was for digital. Maybe not.
Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. Please don’t explode, m’kay?
For the birds, at Hampton Beach.
More birds. I don’t think I have enough bird-centric film pics to stay on track with the previous digital post. Sorry.
Plum Island airport.
Why do I always stop here on the way out to the lighthouse? I haven’t a clue.
The Merrimack River from Plum Island.
Dig that blue water.
And by this point both 35mm cameras were out of film and I was not going to take the time to reload so this is where this post ends. There will be another post from this day that will have the 120 film shots. That’s going to be grouped with some pics I took in Boston last week. I’ll explain later.
It’s been a while but I did something mildly creative this morning. Not really, but a little bit.
For the first time since August I filled up a back pack with cameras and went outside a-shootin’. Digital, film, the works.
More often than not when I start feeling the photo-takin’ need I head to the ocean at sunrise. That’s what I did today. As sunrises go it sort of blew chunks. The forecast I read last night said it would be clear skies at sunrise today. It was not. Not even close. There was a little gap between the horizon and the cloud cover that sort of let me see the sun when it rose, but it was a pretty underwhelming view. Thanks to our friend the Nikon Z5 with the cheap-ish 85mm Chinese made lens I can show you what I’m talking about…
At least the waves looked cool. They were about as high as this little corner of the Atlantic Ocean gets.
There’s our friend, Mr Sun. It was trying its best to break through.
My sunrise stop this morning was at Salisbury Beach which is on the Massachusetts side of the state line. I was planning on starting at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire, but I needed to stop for gas and I knew there were a few stations on the way to Salisbury so I wouldn’t have to go out of my way. Also, Salisbury is closer to home so it gave me more time to take care of things before the sun came up.
After a few minutes on the beach I wandered around the area a little bit looking for things to shoot… and I ended up more or less shooting the same things that I almost always shoot when I go there. Oh well.
Someday I will be there when these lights are actually on.
Artsy chair pic alert:
Lame life preserver pic alert:
Every now and then the sun would break through the clouds and we’d get a few seconds of glorious golden hour light but the clouds kept getting in the way and blocking the sun. It was a little frustrating.
After a few minutes of wandering around I got in the car and drove up to Hampton Beach. That’s two towns North across the New Hampshire state line. I stopped at a usual fishing boat view. Again, the sun kept breaking through and going away. I think I got some good light here using one of the film cameras, but not so much using the digital.
As usual, let’s all say hello to the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plan before it blows up and melts everyone.
Out on the beach itself, would it surprise anyone to learn that this pic was a total accident? It probably shouldn’t.
The seagulls were my friends today. They mostly didn’t run away from me.
Again, when the sun cooperated the view was fantastic.
I left Hampton Beach and headed South to Plum Island to say hello to the Merrimack River and the Plum Island Lighthouse. I made the obligatory stop at the airfield as well.
By this time the sky was pretty blue. The clouds were losing the battle.
Is the water at Plum Island the bluest water on Earth? It’s gotta be in the running, right?
I mean… seriously… just look at that.
I don’t know anything about this boat except that I shoot it every time I come here.
And in closing… the Plum Island Lighthouse… which has to be the most underwhelming lighthouse in the world. I mean it’s not even as tall as the trees that surround it. It’s also not even on the water. It’s a little ways down the street from the river. How effective can it be?
There you have it. A few highlights from this morning’s wanderings. I also shot some film. I had a black and white roll in my FG-20 that was loaded back in August and still had a few shots left (Kentmere 400). Last night I put a roll of Lomography 800 into Dad’s K1000 and a roll of Kodak Gold 200 into my medium format camera. I finished all three rolls and mailed them off to the lab to get them developed. Hopefully I won’t have to wait too long to share the film version of this masterpiece of a post. Be on the lookout.
Will there be another photowalk tomorrow? Depends on the weather. I am off work again on Tuesday too so there could be something then, again if the weather cooperates. Hopefully it will be better than today but who knows.
It felt good to just go outside and shoot stuff, even if it was really cold on the water. Summer is coming. Maybe some day soon I’ll be able to repeat this experience without wearing a winter jacket. That would be sweet, huh?
I shipped seven rolls of film to the darkroom in California on Monday afternoon and I got the scans back on Friday morning! Talk about your epic turn around time!
Finally! The sky was clear at sunrise on a weekend. I took four, count ’em four, cameras out with me. My digital, Nikon Z5, my two 35mm, Dad’s Pentax K1000 and my Nikon FG-20, and my new/ebay medium format experiment, Lomo Lubitel 166 Universal.
The 35mm cameras each had a roll already started. My goal was to finish them off. The Lubitel… what the hell, Robert. I’ve had the camera for months and had not completed even a single test roll. I had already messed up the first roll by over advancing it once and blowing a shot, and then flashing the film when the camera back popped open on its own once. My goal was to finish that roll and then put a second roll through and hope that something worked on one of them enough to let me know if the camera actually works or not. Besides all of that film fun, I just wanted to take a bunch of pics with my Z5 because it’s super fun.
I completed all of those goals. I now have four rolls of film to develop. I’ll place an order today and ship them out tomorrow. The two 120 rolls were fucked up even more than I already knew. I didn’t have any trouble with the second one… or so I thought. The camera can be setup to shoot in 6×6 format or in 4.5×6. I was using the 4.5×6 numbers for advancing the film after each (well… most… there are going to be a bunch of double exposures because I am too stupid to operate a manual camera, I guess) but upon further review, the camera is clearly set up to shoot a square format… so every single shot is going to overlap. Moron.
Anyway… here are a bunch of digital pics.
Hampton Beach, NH at sunrise!
These are from a spot in North Hampton, NH, just a little north of Hampton Beach.
These are from a little spot on route 1A just south of Hampton Beach. I don’t know if it is in Seabrook or in the town of Hampton Beach, but you can see the Seabrook nuclear power plant from here so… kaboom.
After that spot I drove home, but didn’t go home. I went to the Spicket Falls Dam in downtown Methuen. We’ve had massive rains over the last week so the river was roaring.
At this point I still had a few shots left in two of the film cameras so I went over to Greycourt Park where I got my brand new sneakers soaking wet by walking around in the grass. It was nice.
What is that baseball doing there? Who left that behind?
And there you have it. Finally, a photography kinda morning. You would think this would hold me over for a little while at least, but nope. I want to go out again right now. Right Freakin’ Now.
