One of my best friends, Victoria, came into town recently to visit after what seemed like ages with everything that has happened in 2020. We are both artists, so having time to be free thinking and create is imperative. She hadn’t been to the Outer Banks, North Carolina before so I decided we should go there for a night while she was in town. We stayed socially distant of people the entire time which is a welcoming concept in my mind.
We arrived to the beach in the early afternoon and set up a mini beach camp right off highway 12. Barely anyone nearby, we had an entire section of the beach to ourselves to sunbathe and dip in the ocean. In the evening, we sat on our AirBnb deck and painted and drew. The cicadas whispering in nearby woods and a neighbors music lightly playing in the distance. We discussed waking up at sunrise the next morning to catch it from the beautiful Jockeys Ridge. It is the tallest living sand dune on the Atlantic coast and its ancient presence is unequivocal. I have chosen this spot to photograph with clients before but had never actually gone with friends to relax or watch the sunrise. As artists, we both brought our cameras to capture the beauty.
We arrived just minutes before the sun rose. I had brought a white, linen dress for Victoria to wear for just the occasion of galavanting around the dunes. I took my camera out to test, and the humidity immediately fogged up my lens that wasn’t acclimated to the temperature. I continued to do test shots even with the their being a slight softness and fog to the photos. Even those shots had character to add to the story of that morning.
I think as artists we were so happy to be creating while the sun continuous rose and fell upon us and the dunes. It created interesting shadows, golden hues, and cloud colors. This was the only sunrise I had experienced all summer, and I’m so glad we decided to rise to the occasion.
