After many, many articles about Alaska, it’s time to go to the opposite extreme with a visit to the Bill Baggs State Park near Miami in Florida. Way back in 2012, I used to travel to different parts of the USA specifically to take photographs for my stock portfolio and with the whole day at my disposal, I was on the go from sunrise to sunset trying to capture interesting aspects of a location. As it was early December, I was pretty much on my own for many of these shots, as you will see. The beach in this park is among one of the most popular, but when I was there, it was completely empty! The state park covers the lower third of the Key Biscayne island and contains the Cape Florida Light – the oldest standing structure in Miami. This lighthouse was constructed in 1825, later replaced in 1878 by the Fowey Rocks light, but brought back into use in 1978 to mark the Florida Channel and finally decommissioned in 1990.
There is a lovely brick-built cottage alongside the lighthouse itself that was built for the lighthouse keeper, who I obviously thought was Bill Baggs:
A natural assumption, I would have thought. In fact, Bill Baggs was the editor of the Miami News from 1957 to 1969 when he died and fought hard to maintain the beauty of places such as this. The cottage itself fascinated me – it is quite hard to photograph as the vegetation is surrounding it quite closely but with a wide-angle lens and a bit of photoshop work, I got a good photograph of it with the sun coming in from the beach:
As I was looking at this recently, it made me think that if I was a painter, this is just the sort of scene I would sit and paint, so I got to work at my easel to see what I could do with it. My first attempt was a watercolor:
As soon as I had got my brushes clean, I reached for my pastels to try something new:
By now, I was getting sunstroke and so I decided that a quick sketch with charcoal would round out the afternoon:
I must have been improving as time went on, as I think this final charcoal one is my favorite! I jest, of course! These are all digitally created!
The whole place was magical that morning with views of the lighthouse from between the palm trees:
I also was intrigued by the way the clouds were forming in the blue sky around the lighthouse itself – almost like cigarette smoke. I decided to create this one as black and white to make it more about the shapes than the colors:
I left the park around 10am, and so had no chance to see the lighthouse at night. According to Wikipedia, the lighthouse, now owned by the Florida State Parks, was relit in 1996. As I thought it would be nice to have an evening shot, I did do some work in Photoshop to create this one. Not great, but it does (sort of) show what it might look like!
You can find all my Florida images at my portfolio site which offers a 30-day money back guarantee on prints plus free shipping to the USA and Canada.
