I can’t tell you how excited I am to finally be able to share “Shallow Water” with you!
Not only have I been working on these particular photos for the last 6 months – the entire series has been in the works for several years now.
It all started with a picture I randomly took with my first smartphone in 2015 when it was brand new and I was still trying to figure out how to take decent pictures with that tiny thing without a viewfinder. 😄
That day, Bill and I were strolling along Crane Beach in Ipswich, MA, one of my favorite beaches here in New England, as the tide was slowly starting to come in. I was doing one of my favorite things: letting myself get lost in watching the changing shapes and patterns of the tiny, crystal clear waves and the sand underneath just at the water’s edge. There is something so relaxing and meditative and almost hypnotic about that quiet, rhythmic coming and going of the waves, and the patterns that they create. I can watch it forever, but after a while, Bill wanted to move along, so I took a picture with my phone, and we kept walking.
A few days later I was going through the mobile pictures I took that day, most were honestly terrible, but the one of the patterns in the shallow water stood out. I really liked it, so I went back a few weeks later with my “big camera” and shot a whole bunch of pictures.
I ended up with many that I liked, and started working on a brand new series. But right before releasing it, I started questioning myself. Was I crazy? Was I the only one who saw any kind of beauty or anything special in this? Were people going to think I was nuts? And I ended up not releasing them.
A couple of years went by and I kept going back to those images every now and then, I couldn’t let them go. Finally I decided to test the waters (haha 😄) with one, and put “Shallow Water No. 12” up in my store. It took a little while for it to get attention, but then all of a sudden, it did. I got some great feedback on it while I was in Portugal, where by an odd coincidence I had just taken a new set of very similar pictures.
I decided to go back and revive the series, but when I looked at my original shots, aside from No. 12, they really didn’t measure up to the ones I took in Portugal. They were more like a first draft and these new ones the final pieces. There was no question that if the rest of this series were to finally be launched, it would be with the Portuguese pictures. And so it is.
This is a large series, in every sense of the word: there are 26 images in total, and they come in sizes up to 48×72 inches (120×180 cm). That is HUGE!
I can’t wait to hear what you think about this series – I hope you like it as much as I do!
