sand and water are good for the soul

sandbanks provinical park - monica lacey 2011

I’m an island girl, through and through.  When I’m inland for any length of time I start to get claustrophobic – it feels to me like being in a room with no visible doors.  Last night one of my housemates took myself, and Cynthia (the other resident staying here, who is from Shanghai) to Sandbanks Provincial Park.  It was paradise.  Cynthia said she had never been anywhere like it.  Giant sand dunes on a bay off Lake Ontario, the sun was just setting, the water was warm, and you are still allowed to walk/run/play on these dunes!!  Years ago in PEI it became clear that frolicking on the fragile dunes of the north shore was a practice that was destroying the dunes, so now you have to use the boardwalks and paths instead.  As much as I support preservation of ecosystems, I sure had missed running all over the dunes.  At Sandbanks last night I was transported back to Greenwich beach, back in the old days before it officially became a park, and the joy of rolling down the dunes, running along the ridges - oh man those were fun times.

Today was an epic day of photo editing.  I’ve been procrastinating from sorting and editing for a few months, which meant I had a backlog of about 500 or so images to go through. The other blessing of going to Sandbanks was that it was a spectacular place to shoot – I saved those ones until the end today, so that I could savor them again.

I remember when I first studied photography, at Holland College in Charlottetown in 1997, and the excitement of processing a roll of film and making prints.  Although I have been messing about in darkrooms the past couple of years, I mainly shoot digital and the gratification is fairly instant.  I realized today, however, that the editing process still holds some pleasant surprises – a photo can go from good to great when you add a certain temperature to the light, or play with the tone curve, or switch from colour to black & white, for instance.  It’s days like these that I fall in love with photography all over again – it’s been ongoing since my Dad gave me an old Pentax when I was about 8 years old.  I still have it, and it even has a roll of B&W in it, waiting to be finished off & processed :)