Intentionally Overexposed
In a perfect world, this photo set would never have happened. If the weather had cooperated on the morning of October 15, 2017, I would have come back with a more conventional photo set showing a sunrise at Piney Point, Maryland, near the mouth of the Potomac River. The working title was “Potomac Sunrise” – a nod to my 2004 photo set Atlantic Sunrise. However, despite the weather forecasts’ calling for nice weather, that morning, I found 100% cloud cover at Piney Point as the sun began to rise. That meant that my plans went right out the window, as I needed clear skies to get the shots that I needed.
So I had driven two hours down to Southern Maryland for my plans to get clouded out. What to do? Fiddle with the camera and see what I could do with what I had. I ended up setting the exposure settings on my camera too high for normal photos on purpose to see what the result would look like, and photographed around the area, including the river, a mooring dolphin, a few docks, a beach, a rock jetty, and the structures from a nearby oil storage facility. Combined with some post-processing, the result almost resembles a winter scene. It makes me think of a more extreme version of the conditions shown in the Maryland Polar Bear Plunge 2010 photo set. Considering that this would have otherwise been a rainout, I’m not too disappointed with the results.
