I traveled to the Sandfly Bay area with a group of my students to photograph the wildlife.
It was very stormy at the ocean’s edge that morning. Some students, not expecting the sun to penetrate the thick cover of clouds, went to photograph seals and penguins along the shore. Accompanied by one photographer, I took cover at the very end of the bay, on a small stone ledge by a vertical cliff wall that rose from the water. The wall protected us from the wind, which blew a large amount of salty spray up from the ocean. We had almost surrendered weather and rising tide when the sun finally found a gap in the clouds and beamed over the running waves for a few minutes. The whole scene turned pink and dark orange with a glowing backlit.
Sandfly Bay, Otago Peninsula, South Island, New ZealandThe work was showcased in Nature’s Best Photography Awards Exhibition @ Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC