We Love Cape May

We Love Cape May


Each year since we started this adventure called Road Runner Photography Tours we have held a Cape May Tour.  But truth be told, Cape May was a favorite of ours long before we started Road Runner.  This year Mother Nature was quite nice and provided us with good sunrises and sunsets every day of the tour.   But Cape May is so much more than just sunrises and sunsets, with the shore birds, salt marshes, fishing boats, people, and the list goes on.

Cape May and the making of Lemonade

We just finished our annual Cape May Photo Tour weekend and as usual we had a great group of talented and energetic photographers.   Cape May is such a wonderful venue that even though we arrived 2 days early to scout the locations, we still did not cover all of our favorite spots!  

In regard to making Lemonade.  That’s a term of art that I use to illustrate how to deal with the challenges that photography can sometimes present.   The shot above was our first stop with the tour group last Friday evening.  The access to this point is very narrow allowing for only one photographer at a time.  I needed to get my tripod in the water to get the reflection and wanted to show the shot to our clients as an example of one of the possible shots from this location.   Considering that I had 10 people in line behind me, I just took a quick snap and on the back of the camera everything looked fine.   When I started to process this shot I realized that while I had the foreground sharp, my depth of field was not sufficient to render the lighthouse as sharp as I would have preferred.  So I used a couple of Flypaper Textures to give the shot a different feel and I think with the use of textures the importance of sharpness in the image becomes less important.  

I also use and recommend the plugin “Dirty Pictures” from Totally Rad Software for managing and working with Textures in Photoshop.

We are planning to do our annual Cape May Weekend next year a littler earlier so we can photograph the iconic Cape May Boats that line the beach!   Registration is open and it’s not too early to secure your spot on this tour… .   If you want to keep up with all things Road Runner, please join our Meetup and our Mailing List(on the right side of the page).

A Beautiful Day at the Beach

We just finished a very busy summer and fall and now it's time to catch up on things that could wait.  One of those things is to revisit images from the past year.  The shot above was taken during our Cape May Tour last month.  The sunrise was less than hoped for due to a total lack of clouds, but there is always something to shoot.  You just have to open your mind and let it come to you.  The sun was backlighting the incoming waves and the only thing that could have made it any better would have been bigger waves!

Closed for the Season

Last weekend we wrapped up our photography tour in Cape May, NJ.  Every time I visit Cape May I find more to like about this little town on the shore.  This year my tour partner Denise Silva and I arrived a day early to do some scouting and that included exploring the little coastal towns along the South Jersey shore.  Each town seems to have a unique personality.  Considering that these towns are so close to each other it is quite surprising they are so different from each other.  I really enjoyed working with the different levels  of photographic talent, some of our more experienced participants were a great source of inspiration and it was great to help our beginners improve over the weekend. 

My only disappointment was not being able to find an open shop for Ice Cream.

We will be going back to Cape May next October.  We would  love to have you join us in the great location!