Spring came and went with nary a whisper. The weather now is a typical Florida summertime pattern: heat and humidity, which means you travel light, and you shoot early or late when it’s somewhat cooler. Roxanne and I did the travel light part perfectly. We stowed our gear in the awesome Think Tank Photo Change Up bags. I brought my Canon dSLR and minimal Lensbaby gear and my Fuji X-100. Roxanne had almost the same setup, but her Fuji was the X-Pro 1. Oh yeah, we both brought a cold bottle of water.

Our destination was the Cortez Fishing Village in Manatee County, Florida. This is a working fishing village with a fish packing plant and lovely old working boats in various states of repair and decay. We arrived fairly early and started creating images from the Star Island Fish Company restaurant, which incidentally serves an awesome grouper sandwich for lunch or dinner. But the restaurant was closed when we got there, and we were all alone except for a couple of fishermen working on their boats. When you photograph a place like this, there is a wide variety of subject matter. Within a small area, you can photograph birds, Sarasota Bay, islands, boats, and all of the wonderful minutiae, such as fishing gear, nets, buoys and so on.

Our original goal was to stay long enough to have a grouper sandwich for lunch, but Mother Nature turned up the wick and we were sweating bullets an hour before the restaurant opened for business. So we sought the solace of the Bird Blind, Roxanne’s white Honda Odyssey, which is blessed with a wonderful ice-cold air conditioner. But we did stay long enough to create a wide variety of images. The following are some of my Lensbaby shots, which I edited in Lightroom and converted to black and white with  Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.

Enjoy.
Cheers,
Doug