Doing justice to an old friend

Adraga Surf, Sintra-Cascais Natural Park, Portugal

I recently had some nice surprises while looking through my old film archive for photos that I may use for online sales. It seems that, for some strange reason that I cannot comprehend, there were a few images lying around the archive to which I had not payed proper attention in the past.

Here's one of those images.  It was shot on Adraga Beach, a beach near Sintra that is well known to Lisbon-based landscape photographers because of some oddly shaped rocks. Yet there was nothing odd about the rocks in the image, just a soft light hitting them as the waves and the surf rolled in. I liked this image the moment I saw it in the archive. I like the composition, the shadows on the rocks, the light reflected on the waves. It may not be one of my best shots, but for me it just has a nice, balanced feel.

What puzzles me is how this image could have been unnoticed for years on my archive. I don't really understand why I overlooked it for so long. Maybe at the time I was so interested in shooting the odd shaped rocks in the beach with a nice sunset sky, that I didn't pay any attention to the other shots I took during the afternoon. And since that shooting session didn't provide me with the images I wanted in the first place, I overlooked all others... Big mistake.

But hey, we learn from our mistakes, right ? Well some people do anyway, and I sure try to learn from mine. Sometimes I need to look at my images objectively and with no preconceived expectations in order to see them for what they are and not for what I wanted them to be. And sometimes even if I didn't capture what I originally wanted to, what I bring home can actually be very beautiful.

So I guess this image deserved that I did it justice after being forgotten for so long. I humbly apologize to it and hope to learn from my mistakes...