Last week, the winter greys and browns had set in and I was craving vibrant colour, “like the fishing boats on Crash Boat Beach”, I told my sister.
Crash Boat Beach is in Puerto Rico, a two-minute drive from the condo my sister, our niece and I stayed at during a vacation in February 2010. The beach occupies the site of a former military port where boats were stationed to rescue downed air crews from Ramey Air Force Base in adjacent Aguadilla. Bits and pieces of the pier remain but most platforms are accessible only to strong swimmers.
What appealed most about the beach to my photographing eye were the numerous, brightly coloured fishing boats locals would launch directly into the surf. I love how people who live in tropical climes are not afraid of colour!
These photos are jpegs made with my Canon Powershot A570 IS pocket/compact camera. I suspect the images I would have shot on my SLR camera are on one of the last ten rolls of undeveloped slide film sitting in the fridge from before I went digital in June 2010. I have tweaked these a bit in Lightroom to saturate the colours and bump up the contrast (can’t do much more without RAW files, like recover blown out sky). These images won’t win any photo contests, but they prove that you don’t need a fancy camera to make images that make you happy.