There are few photographic moments more enjoyable than shooting a beautiful young lady on a beach at sunset, but when you add some bubbles to the mix, it can become a true celebration!
Last night my special friend Simona and I braved the near-freezing 70’s at Cypress Pointe as the sun fell from the sky and the gentle breeze came in from the bay. When we imagined the getting-together to do a bubble shoot, we hadn’t factored in the breeze and how it limits how much play you can inject into such a shoot.
But once we found the slight shelter of an alcove and a shapely mangrove tree, we managed to get a few shots that I think are worth sharing.
Cypress Pointe also sports large swathes of pink Muhly Grass that we decided to factor into some bubble-less shots. These grasses provided endless movement to the scene as they caught every gust of breeze and turned it into a pink ocean of loveliness that only Mother Nature could create. How could we resist?
I hope you like this selection of images!
After we broke bread, shared wine, and lost ourselves in meaningful conversation, I climbed back into my car and revisited the whole evening in my mind as I drove home.
This visit was obviously of a truly pleasurable evening with a good friend, but it was actually the bubbles that twisted my mind off into the eventual stream of thought.
The last time I played with bubbles was probably when my girls were toddlers, several hundred years ago. And while no doubt there are many more thrilling avenues of high-tech excitement these days, there is an innocent enjoyment with bubbles that is hard to match.
Very few of us will ignore a bubble as it floats by and while there may be several reasons why, perhaps one is that it hearkens back to when we too were toddlers and life opened up to us with such innocence.
For most of us, life replaces innocence with stresses and reality and as tooth fairies, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny fade away into the dim recesses of our adult mind, innocence too becomes a faded memory of our past.
But the loss of innocence also becomes a thief of joy as we increasingly remove ourselves from gentle pastimes that children enjoy but which we now deny ourselves.
We use our maturity and sophistication as a stick with which to beat the final childish smiles from our lives and then wake up one morning, wondering why we have such a feeling of unhappiness and melancholy.
Life is very much what we make of it. It is the singular thing that actually does belong to us … with a value far beyond anything else we may accumulate over time. In choosing to waste it on sadness or frivolous pursuits, we completely miss the point.
The pursuit of happiness is extolled as something we should have a “right” to and yet there is a happiness of childish pursuits that we willingly shed.
Bubbles brought me back to mine last night. They reminded me of a piece of me that I had locked away in a box in my mental attic.
I guess the thought that I am offering here is that each of us should open the box where we have discarded our innocence so that our hearts can be restored with some child-like smiles. Go ahead … blow a little!
