Halibut Cove is a visual debate between sky, water, and rock. The tide rises and drops. The shoreline and resulting graphic balance change constantly.  Reefs appear and disappear. Water and sky are in flux in texture, color, magnitude, luminance.  Compositions come and go. Photographing here ultimately tends to be an exercise in forbearance: because the elements are always changing, there is no end in sight for someone intent on either capturing every different change, mood, and variation or capturing the zenith - the ultimate - of possibilities.  The former means endless shooting; the latter means endless waiting.  When does the ambitious photographer stop?   Or is the absolute zenith too chimerical, a photographic fata morgana because it would mean day after day, indeed, year after year, of either endless shooting or endless waiting?  Or is it too easy, too unambitious, too impatient, to settle merely for the best image reasonably attainable?   Anyway, does the photographer - much less the world - really need that ultimate image of Halibut Cove?  Is it a confession of defeat for someone to rationalize the sufficiency of the image actually captured in a few minutes with a modicum of effort and skill?  And is an image achieved with intense effort measurably "better?"  Is it even really the "ultimate?"  Tomorrow's image is potentially be even better.

Some moments require that level of committed effort (think of sports with their fleeting opportunity to see the decisive goal). Or extreme luck at events (think Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald).  Or extreme prolonged study, usually with animals in nature, like National Geographic photographers who disappeared for three or four years and returned with 30 rolls of 36-exposure Kodachrome. But most of the time, neither extraordinary effort nor extraordinary luck are needed.  And if they were, the photographic world would be poorer. And photographers, transfixed by the demands the ultimate image might require, would be frozen and discouraged, incapacitated.  

So, that said, these are good enough. This is an eclectic cross-section of views of Halibut Cove.

Love bites: two gulls.  Not much effort was involved.  They screeched annoyingly to get attention.  No food was involved.  Perhaps love was.

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Mother sea otter gives a ride to her big pup. 

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Zephyrs ripple cove waters.  On this day light breezes seemed to riffle through unpredictably, dropping now and then to the water's surface to rough up patches of smooth water, and then lift and shift and set down somewhere else. 

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Low tide almost grounds The Kelsey.  It floats in an excavated pool.  EF4A7431

Striations tell something of Cove origins. Or at least the origins of this bluff.

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Grounded, abandoned, returning to earth.  

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Composition in red.  Corrugated siding on the Boardwalk.   EF4A7556

View from above showing part of the Boardwalk and the isthmus and the pasture and memorial beyond. EF4A7660