The Same Beach, a Hundred Times
· by Roy Edlund
Here’s something I learned while making this calendar.
I pulled 43 of my favorite photos to choose 15 from, and somewhere in the sorting, laid out side by side, I noticed something humbling: a lot of them were the same.
Not identical - but the same sunrise, the same wave, the same little bird at the edge of the same gold water.
Variations on a handful of moments I apparently can’t stop photographing.
This one lost its spot to a nearly identical frame with a single sanderling instead of a flock. That was the whole difference. One bird, or five.
And then it hit me that these sanderlings are both the problem and the point.
Look at them, a line of little birds all doing the same thing, each one just slightly its own.
That’s my entire catalog.
That’s fourteen years of walking the same beach at the same hour, loving the same light enough to photograph it a hundred times and swear every time that this one’s different.
Maybe that’s not running out of ideas.
Maybe it’s just what it looks like to love one place long enough that you keep trying to get it right.
This one didn’t make the cut. But it made me understand my own work a little better, which is more than most photos manage.
Love from here. ❤️
Prints of the photos in this post are available in the Beach Bum Gallery on paper, canvas and metal.