Megan Howell Photography: Outer Banks: Covered with Clouds

I took my usual trip to the Outer Banks this summer. If you saw my last post, you saw some of the photos I captured of my nephew, Henry. (click here if you didn't get to see it: Henry: Age 3)

Even though we had beautiful sunshine for Henry's pictures, most of the week was spent in clouds. In many years of coming to the OBX, I think this was the greatest amount of rain we have ever had. This meant that a lot of the photos I took for myself (NOTHING beats a good photowalk on the beach) had a moody look to them. So I decided to make a large portion of them black and white to help enhance the mood lighting I was given.

What comes with rain? Wind. So I had fun capturing the grass swaying back and forth.

This was actually in the middle of the day, though you wouldn't think so.

Do you think it was really that empty? Or did I do some photoshop magic?

Ok, I admit, I definitely used photoshop on this. The threat of a thunderstorm does not chase away devoted beach goers or fishermen. There were probably about 30-40 in this shot that I managed to remove. Sorry if I ruined the magic.

Right at my entrance to the beach is this massive anchor that sits about 30 feet into the ocean. It has been there since before I started going (I actually use it as my guide to get home after a long walk).

I probably took too many photos of this, trying to get a good composition of breaking waves around as well as trying to use a slow enough shutter speed to "soften" the water, even though I didn't have a tripod with me.

I captured this teen-weeny little crab on the dock as my father and brother learned to kite-surf. When I say teeny-weeny, I really mean it....probably 1-2 inches long!

If you have every been to the OBX beach, you have probably seen the sand crabs that live there, burrowing their holes in the sand. This little guy had set up shop right next to the tire tracks of one of the safety vehicles.

I love this shot of him just peeking to make sure it's safe before coming out.

This next set of photos is not black and white, but is still relatively monochromatic.

I took a bike ride to a portion of the beach that is relatively empty, and the pelicans were just flying back and forth and back and forth. It gave me lots of opportunities to capture them in flight and practice my tracking abilities.