Westerly the course of vacation takes its way

You probably know the famous painting by Emanuel Leutze in the United States Capitol Building (with a copy in the Smithsonian American Art Museum). In this case, I was on a lightning trip over this past weekend to Westerly, Rhode Island, to facilitate a family reunion. I saw some beautiful things and tried to do justice to some of them in images.

McKim, Meade, and White designed the Narragansett Pier Casino, which burned down in 1900. The towers, arching over Ocean Road, survived and are Narragansett’s best known landmark.

A delicious dinner was had by all at the Coast Guard House in Narragansett (figure 6). I had the waygu ribeye.

George’s is a landmark in Galilee, near Point Judith (figure 8). My mother-in-law goes for the genuine New England clam chowder, I go for the fish and chips.

Down the boardwalk (of sorts; it’s not a true boardwalk) from our hotel, the Pleasant View Inn, was a wee carnival with a ferris wheel that changes colors and designs with epilepsy-inducing speed. I caught one pattern with a 1/4s exposure (figure 10).

I had a few minutes to myself at sunset on Saturday and took a pretty successful series (figures 11-17) at Little Maschaug Pond in Westerly, a couple of hundred meters west of our hotel. The best is figure 11, I think, titled Vaut le voyage.

I like the reflection of the sun in figure 12, Mérite un détour. Still, it distracts a bit from the subtler reflections of the trees on the far side of the pond.

The little red dot above the horizon in figure 18 is one of the Block Island lights. The moon was nearly full and coming in and out of the rapidly moving clouds. You can see the effect of the clouds’ shadows in the moon’s sparkling reflection off the waters. The very grey palette is just about what I saw.

I always feel like I’m dying when I get up to catch blue hour in the morning (figure 19). But once the camera is up and the work has begun I get a reprieve! This image looks east toward Misquamicut Beach, which I always think of as Misquamacus Beach. Anyhow, the blue grades very evenly in the high-res image. It was about 100% humidity and I was constantly wiping the lens for the first ten minutes or so.

This is the other vaut le voyage image I got, of a sailboat about twenty-five minutes before sunrise. The peachy dawn beautifully sets off the cloud bank off shore. You can see Block Island low on the horizon behind the boat.

Bink-bonk-bunk (figure 21) is the first of a series of images I captured (figures 21-24) of three fishermen and a dog. Each one looks like he’s bringing his rod down on the one in front’s head. They started early and proceeded west down the beach toward me. There was a lot of spray and it was so humid that the wind coming off the ocean was foggy. This was like fifteen minutes before sunrise.

You can get a feel for the distance of the fishermen in figure 21. In this photo, at 6:21 a.m., the sun was just coming over the horizon, as you can see. It was a great piece of luck that there was a clear area behind the low clouds.

I tried again and again to get a shot with both the fisherfolk and the dog silhouetted separately against the bright surf. That damn dog was all over the place, and this was about the best shot I got. You see that the dog is blurry at 1/20 s.

Figure 24 was alllllmost successful, but as you see, the dog overlapped with one of the folk.

There were birds everywhere, but runner-up was the number of motorboats. There are a few in figure 25.

Figure 28 is the surf from the Pleasant View’s terrace on Saturday morning. That’s Watch Hill, Rhode Island in the background.

The final image (figure 29) is of two boaters I spied on the Pawcatuck River from Riverbend Cemetery in Westerly proper, which is a story unto itself.

Nikon Z 7ii with Nikkor Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 lens. Everything had to be edited on my iPad, so it was Affinity Photo for the images that required extra care, and the blunt hammer (I mean Apple Photos) for the rest.