Hinshaw column: Everything was refreshed after beach storm

Published 12:00 am Friday, August 1, 2008

You might wonder what made me photograph the beach at night.
That’s not hard to answer: It looked neat.
There’d been a thunderstorm late in the evening. People fled while it was going on. It hit right at dark, and people had completely disappeared. They started coming back out on the beach once the weather cleared.
It was easy to shoot, actually. The hotel’s floodlights were aimed out at the ocean. The pool area was lit up.
Everything looked brighter and clearer, clean and shiny. The wet palm trees glistened. There was no noise at the pool. Everything was quiet except for the surf rolling in.
The light around the pool and the trees was good light ó almost like daylight.
As the evening wore on, a couple of surf fishermen showed up.
One kid ventured out to the pool. He didn’t stay long. He shouldn’t have been out there, because there was still lightning in the distance.
He rode the lazy river for a little while. Kids especially seem to like it.
Little by little, the beach came back to life.
But there was a period of a couple of hours when the beach was cleared and the pool was cleared and everything was quiet and everything was refreshed.