By the time Mark and I got to the beach with one piece of firewood each, folks had already started up a fire and were sitting singing while Steve and Maribeth played guitar and regaled us with their special versions of songs. Instead of giving a description of each thumbnail below, I’ll just list the position of people around the fire: from left to right, Steve Engel, Maribeth Crowe, Dede Stokes, Kathryn Bardsley, Ann Gregory, Peter Gregory, Jim Boes, Bill Laughrey, Lynne Voit, Regan Voit, John Pineau, and Mary Pineau. There were other people there, but sitting on our side of the fire so that I had no clear shot of them.
I took a very few shots by flash, and they just didn’t look like they had anything to do with sitting around an outdoor fire, so they don’t appear here. For all the others, I cranked the “film speed” of my digital camera up to the max, and hoped that a time exposure would catch the spirit of the evening. This meant that in lots of shots people moved enough to get blurred into a smear; most of these aren’t here. And since I was just using a monopod to hold the camera relatively fixed, there’s still a lot of blur. The explanation for the bright streaks is that the slow shutter speed (usually 1/3 second) stretched out upward-flying sparks into lines. A few of the pictures are satisfactory, though. Pick and choose!
There was so much to see and do this day that it was our busiest, biggest photographic day of the tour. I snapped the shutter over 270 times, and I think Mark was equally enthusiastic. But we still had four days’ worth of pictures to take and hikes to embark on.
Previous day’s pictures; this morning’s pictures; this afternoon’s pictures; next day’s pictures.
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