Virginia Breeze

I spend a lot of time looking up at the sky and following the circle of life.  Trying to figure out whether we will be seeing a nice sunset in the evening or a great sunrise. It’s pretty tricky business.

And I also do the same thing early in the morning but there’s not a whole lot you can see. I usually just lie in bed and try to have some sort of psychic experience that will tell me whether or not to go out.

But that doesn’t work very well as you can imagine. So as we often do I decided to go to the search engines and try to find an answer. This is an interesting discussion in a forum for photographers about sunsets. They talk about cloud formations.

Mid level clouds come up several times as promising for this sort of thing. And as I think back there may be something to this. The sun goes down and then it shoots rays up at an angle. If there are heavy clouds sitting on or near the horizon these rays don’t have a chance. But if there are thinner clouds further up the sun’s rays can penetrate whatever is near the horizon and reflect off of them. And then the light can bounce back down to earth and the happy photographer. I guess. Here’s the link for those who follow these things.

Once the sun goes down the rays start shooting up instead of down and interesting things begin to happen.

Here’s a pretty interesting article in the Virginian-Pilot about the festival.

http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=133624&ran=103103

Interesting photo category

This event is actually the North American Sand Sculpting Championship. The Christian Science Monitor did an interesting story on Sand Sculpting last year and I refer you to that here:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0728/p11s02-algn.html

This article has a list of all sand sculpting events throughout the year. They stretch from coast to coast.

Here are some more of the photos I took at this years event.  Clearly this is not a photo of King Neptune.  He’s next in line and got caught up in red tape.

http://davidnotes.com/2007/09/30/neptune-festival/