Dan Sherman's photostream  

Well, after four months away I'm going to try and bring my flickr stream back to life. I'll tell you about the shot first. There are only a few areas on Florida's 3,500 miles of coastline that aren't the sandy, tourist attracting beaches that most people like. But that means spots like this have only a few visitors. This beach is only an hour and a half from my home here in Orlando near Washington Oaks Gardens State Park. Most sunrises here are like this in the sunshine state, but the clouds on this morning seemed to be moving extra quickly and made for some awesome sun rays.

If you want to read about what I've been doing, keep going.

I took a much needed break from flickr and from photography altogether. If you read my last post, you probably got a hint of how I felt. I started to become less motivated and felt less artistic and I honestly think flickr had a lot to do with that. Sounds kind of silly, but a lot of the time it's like a competition here on flickr. I felt frustrated when some shots I really liked only had a few views or favs. It's ridiculous, I know, but it's how I really felt and I know I shouldn't have felt that way but I couldn't get over it at the time. Moving from Oregon to Florida changed a lot of things too. It is beautiful here, but a very different kind of beauty. The light is amazing, but it takes a lot of hunting and creativity to find a landscape that complements the light.

After my last post, I didn't go out and take any pictures for a few weeks and just spent a lot of time taking walks with my wife and dogs and just looking at things. It was therapeutic. I think I started to appreciate subtle beauty a bit more instead of looking at everything through a lens and expecting epic light. Then I started photographing again and it was like starting all over. I enjoyed taking pictures of things that would't be that interesting here on flickr. I thought the things I photographed were awesome and it's cool to feel that way again. I think that's how flickr made me feel, like things I used to find interesting were...meh. So, after reconsidering a lot of things about photography, I'm ready to get back here and seek out inspiration from all of you. I am really looking forward to checking out your streams.

By the way, I also spent way to much time burning a lot of rods and cones designing a new website from scratch. I did it all myself, so if you do check it out I would really like to know what you think.

I've been in some kind of a creativity funk the past few months. You know how some say you are your own worst critic? Well lately I haven't been impressed by any of my shots. I'm not looking for any complementary boosters...just venting. It's frustrating. I made a random decision in my processing just now and went back through old images...which I never do, and came across this one. Is that the answer? To get more critical of past shots? I'm sure everyone goes through this at one point or another. Anyway, this shot was taken in March at Crater Lake with my very first SLR, a Canon AE-1 Program loaded with Fujichrome Velvia.

It wasn't until the last few days of our trip that we discovered this extremely rocky stretch of coastline on Leeward Oahu. The best part about it was there weren't any other tourists around! That is a well in the foreground, but the waves never really cooperated enough to make a cool shot. There were lots of wells in this area.

Back to the Hawai'i posts! Another shot from one of the most famous beaches in the world...which we actually thought was a little over rated. I mean, sure there's waves and sand just footsteps from all these hotels, but a lot of the beaches on the Leeward side of Oahu were definitely more photogenic and most lacked other tourists.

Taken long after a so-so sunset on the North Shore, but the afterglow provided some nice pastel colors. North Shore was our favorite spot to visit on Oahu; the laid back culture, the sea turtles on the beach, and the food!