I spent the better part of a week on a small island on Lake Ontario with my family last month.  For anyone seeking a vacation of solace and a break from the ordinary world burdened with modern conveniences and the South Pacific is out of your budget, I highly recommend the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York near Cape Vincent.  We spent the week on a small island accessible only by a boat.  Luckily, the satellite Internet service worked only intermittently .  The house we stayed in is the private hunting retreat of a Connecticut family who rents the residence when not using it themselves. The island seemed like it was straight out of an episode of Lost… we even found the “hatch” on our many ATV rides across the island terrain.

It’s often said that photographers don’t really ever go on vacation, because we have a tendency to take our cameras with us wherever we go.  I suppose it’s out of some passionate need to record the world as we see it, as it’s happening… differently than how the human eye is capable of experiencing it on its own without removing the element of perpetual time.  Those familiar with my work know that while I do occasionally photograph weddings in new and far away places, I mostly photograph weddings at a lot of the same locations over and over again.  As someone who embraces the creative aspect of my job, that could get old very quickly.  The challenge for me is to take the same settings week after week, and find a way to see them differently… to find new perspectives, to seek light in a way that my clients cannot understand, to discover beauty in places where no one else sees it.  So while on vacation, I decided to challenge myself in the confines of a small island, to find a different way to photograph the same thing every night.  So began the sunset challenge on Grenadier Island.

We arrived on a “scary boat ride” after dark on July 21st.  Technically, my photos from the first night were of twilight, not sunset, but the 12 hour car ride didn’t get us there until after the sun had already set.

July 21, 2013

July 22, 2013

July 23, 2013

July 24, 2013

July 25, 2013

Our last night was, of course, my favorite.  I hadn’t planned on making a portrait of my children, but it became the logical choice while they were picking wildflowers while I was trying to figure out how to create something different than what I had done the previous nights.

A sunset is an obvious example.  It is already beautiful on its own.  The challenge is taking something so beautiful and finding a different way to see it each time.  The joy of my job is to see something, to create something that doesn’t already exist all on its own, that doesn’t take form without applying context and a narrowed vision.

Thank you to everyone who bestows the opportunity onto me to apply my vision to the most important days of your lives.  Some photographers hate weddings, but I am truly privileged to be invited into the the lives of so many families to document and help others see what I see.  This has been a year of rediscovering the parts of my job that I love and doing a little letting go of the parts that I don’t.  I am blessed to do what I love.