Acadia National Park

• Richard Jefferies.

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My wife and I have been traveling together for eight years now, and we sometimes sit together and look back at the pictures we have on our trips. There are some trips where we don’t much, and then there are trips that are etched vividly in our memories. I think after eight years, we have finally cracked the secret. Trips that go perfectly according to the plan are the ones which we don’t remember very well as opposed to trips where nothing went according to plan. We started noticing this on our first trip together, and after eight years and countless trips together, I can confidently say there is some merit to this theory.

Our first trip together was to visit the beautiful Acadia National Park. There was not much planning involved, and we struggled during this trip. One of the spots I had in mind for this trip was the pinnacle of Cadillac Mountain, as it's touted as the first place to see the morning sun anywhere in the United States. We thought the hard part of this would be waking up at 5 am as you can drive straight up the top of the mountain. It was stunning to see the view from the top, and the light was magnificent but what took us off guard was the cold. The top of the mountain was bitterly cold, and the strong winds coming off the Atlantic didn’t help either. We were unprepared for the wind in our wool coats and beat a hasty retreat after just a few shots. We ended up in a small and cozy breakfast spot that served nice hot coffee and blueberry pancakes made with fresh blueberries from their backyard. We still remember this trip so clearly that we compare the bone-chilling cold we experienced here whenever we are getting ready for a sunrise shot.

Acadia National Park, Maine, view from the top of Gorham Mountain, a midget of a peak at 160m. altitude, reached by a 20 minute hike up, 180° view...

• Chinese Proverb.

One of the last views of the visible sky before the fog moved in to obscure the entire sky. The trail of white clouds seen in the sky made me think...

There isn't a better place to be while witnessing a beautiful moment, whether big or small, dramatic or subtle. While dinner was being consumed the...

• Richard M. Nixon.

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Staying with the theme of Acadia National Park, today’s shot is another image from the same trip. As I mentioned in my earlier post, we didn’t prepare at all for the trip other than for booking a bed and breakfast. The lack of a plan extended to the photo locations as well, I used to belong to the school of run and gun philosophy of photography at that time. I had no plans and when I saw an interesting spot, I had a bad case of FOMO and didn’t know when to stop. It was probably brutal for my wife as I would stay in one location and take about 300 images because I didn’t know when to stop. Because of this approach, we missed a lot of nice spots in the park. Now that I look back at the images from the trip, of 1248 images, I only have a handful of images that I would consider worthy of posting.

When I look at my recent trips, the numbers of photos tend to be much lower, and I have a high number of keepers from those trips. The main difference has been a change in my approach to photography. It went from a selfish endeavor with the sole purpose of making me happy to truly appreciating the beauty of nature and sharing it with the people I love. So rather than expecting nature to cooperate with my whims, and I adjusted my photography to suit the conditions. My two-hour rants about the conditions not being up to par were gone, and I am pretty sure this change was a major reason why my wife decided to stick with me.

Acadia National Park as the sun sets behind me on a cloudy evening there along the Atlantic Ocean. The LE really smoothed out the ocean nicely,...