3 Shots: Rudee Inlet

Until relatively recently, Virginia Beach was mostly farmland crisscrossed by the creeks and swamps of tidal estuaries.  The farmland is mostly gone today, except of course for the vast rural hinterland of Pungo.  In its place has sprung up a car-centric ecosystem of stripmalls, suburban neighborhoods, and military bases. The water, however, remains. Much of it is drained, displaced, or managed, but there are still places where land meets water without lawns or culverts or any of the obvious markers of human impact.  One of these is the upper reaches of Rudee Inlet, where  a busy inlet of whalewatching boats and charter fisherman becomes clam beds and swampgrass.  I took a paddle out there this weekend, and not for the first time, I was reminded of how lucky I am to be able to put my kayak in just a couple blocks from my house.  Here's three shots:

I don't know kind of bird that is on the right.  He was an active little bugger though, and getting a picture of him was pretty challenging - I was paddling all over the place to catch him still.  In the end, it worked out, though the noise level is pretty high.  I really don't know how to use the luminance slider in LIghtroom, but I plan to figure it soon.  The communications boom on the right, by the way, is from one of the Virginia Beach Police boats.

I couldn't get a picture of the actual sunset, as it slipped behind a dense cloudbank, but I think this is more interesting and attractive anyway.  I should have opened up the aperture more to get the foreground in focus, though it's awkward to do in my camera, and I would have had to figure out how to hold my camera still.  That would have been hard as I was holding the camera above my head on my paddleboard, but still I wish had tried.  Next time.

It's just a picture of a tree.  That's it.