Laura and I went out to Sandy Hook after work on Friday to take advantage of the great light you get at the end of the day. I want to put some photographs of beach scenes and lighthouses and stuff in our family room, and the Sandy Hook lighthouse is close by and quite historic.

I think I got the photo I wanted, finally. I've been out there a couple of times since I got my Digital Rebel back in October, but hadn't quite captured what I wanted with the light and everything. This one did.

I got some other neat shots, at least one of which will probably also hang somewhere in the house. There was a large group of Canadian Geese wandering around an open field on the grounds of Fort Hancock out by the lighthouse. I figured I would see how close I could get to them with my telephoto zoom. The answer was "not very". I got a couple of shots of them, but nothing terribly close, before they started to fly away. This photograph of them starting to scatter falls under the heading of "happy accident". Some people would spend hours in Photoshop running filters to create this shot from a decent, in-focus shot. But this is how it came out of the camera for me, thanks to a shutter speed of 1/20 of a second, a zoom set at 200 mm, and me moving. I quite like the effect. The frame was added later, of course, the product of spending hours in Photoshop running filters.

I quite like the look of this shot of a weather station on top of one of the buildings that once served as officers' housing.

My lovely wife with her pooch radar noticed this particular sign.

I just liked the way the light was hitting this tiny duplex, which presumably housed a lower class of officer than some of the mansions directly overlooking the bay.

Watch that first step. It's a doozy.