Waves from Hurricane Lee at Port Maitland
POTY
I like to look back at the end of the year and do a Picture of the Year post – the POTY.
This year there were a couple of good candidates for the POTY honours, what with my book coming out, so the book cover would be one such image. However, I think this year the winner is quite clear.
In September, Nova Scotia had a couple of big storms hit, which coming on top of a drought and forest fires in the Spring made for a rather eventful summer weather-wise. On Friday, September 15, Hurricane Lee was out in the Atlantic making a bee line for Yarmouth County. That morning, the Canadian Press called me and asked if I’d be able to get some pre-storm prep images, and also take some during the storm if I was able to safely. I took a bunch of images on Friday afternoon and evening, and a couple of them made some of the newspapers CP sells to the next morning.
Saturday came, and Lee came right at us, so I drove around, carefully, and took the image that you see above about three hours before Lee’s centre actually passed us just off-shore. The 7 meter plus waves broke right over the breakwater here in Port Maitland which made for a great photo-op. I used a long lens and was standing well back, but the resulting image was used by CP and picked up by the Associated Press which meant that by the next day the images were being used around the world. News outlets across North America used this image, and so did papers and websites in Europe and Asia.
It was great fun to see the wave image selected as a Canadian “most powerful” Image of the week by the CBC, and to watch the spreading of the images as more and more outlets used one or more of my photos.
My photographic journey continues as 2024 comes, and along with it the 50th anniversary of me having sold images to news outlets. It’s been fun, and I look forward to new challenges and photographic opportunities.
May we all have a prosperous and peaceful New Year in 2024.
