The textures of Coastal Maine

 

It seems to me that my shots this year fell into essentially two categories: Classic images of coastal Maine, and texture shots.  By texture, I mean something that's fairly characteristic of my photography and is becoming moreso: photos that show high contrast between objects, or show off the texture of ordinary objects themselves.

I took a lot of photos of beach debris of one sort or another, and rocks, and ordinary things like shells and seaweed in ways that focused on their surfaces.  It's kind of fun to look at them in retrospect, and note what it is that caught my eye in the first place, and see how it turned out.

I'll stop describing now and let you see firsthand what I'm talking about:

I keep meaning to look up what these amazing purple flowers are.  They are all along our camp site on Cobscook Bay, and look like ordinary flowers that you'd see growing in a field or in woods.  But these delicate lovelies spend large parts of their lives submerged entirely underwater during high tides, and grow surrounded by plants that look far more like seaweed.  They fascinate me.  See the surrounding seaweed below:

Rocks.  Ah, how I love the texture of rocks.  Check out these gorgeous boulders that are on the beach near the Quoddy Head, and I assume they must be loaded with iron.  I love how the salt spray makes them rust in fantastic rich patterns.

I also loved driftwood this year, and all the debris that winds up washing up on beaches, and textures that life makes in the sand.

  

This one is fantastic.  I'm not sure what it is, but assume some kind of plant with feathery strands, or some sort of coral-ish thing.  But it's got coral textures and barnacles on the mussel shell it's stuck to, too.  Awesome.