An Adventure to Long Island and Jones Beach

Lukey and Kenzie's last day of school was Friday and we were on the road to Long Island with them in tow by early Saturday morning. We all had a great time with family and at a few different events. The kids were really looking forward to some beach time though! Actually, I think we all were looking forward to some beach time.

The beach was foggy and quite deserted when we arrived in the morning. We set up our stuff right where I figured the surf would be at high tide and it turns out I was right because the lifeguards placed an "Umbrella Line" sign just in front of us when they came on duty.

The kids spent the entire previous day playing with their Long Island cousins. Little did they know, Aunt Margaret had planned to surprise them by joining us at the beach too. So, they spent the entire time on Long Island socializing with people and it was obvious they enjoyed themselves.

Jones Beach was beautiful, as always. The sand at this particular beach is a fine white sand... the water on this particular day was rather warm and quite clear with a turquoise tint... the surf was relatively calm which was good for these inexperienced six-year-olds... it was so foggy when we arrived at the beach that we couldn't see more than a few hundred yards in front of us and the tall Jones Beach tower was shrouded in the dense fog... and, as the day progressed, the wind picked up significantly which effectively pushed the fog out and left us with a beautiful sunny day. Also noteworthy is that the crowd was unusually happy and playing well with each other too!

I had three Sony cameras with me and an assortment of lenses. I also had a waterproof housing for my small Sony action camera which came in handy down in the surf at the beach. In all, I shot thousands of photos and dozens of video clips but I somehow managed to whittle down dozens of video clips containing six hours of driving and our day at the beach into a very nice 23 minute video...







Some stats on the video... This video required quite a lot of work. The beginning of the movie (the car scenes) was sped up 15x to give it a timelapse feel (and to save time) which is like showing us driving at 975 mph! The finished video is larger than 1.5 gb's in size... although my computer and monitor are high-end 4k resolution, my cameras are only Full HD (1920 x 1080) so this resolution only takes up a quarter of my screen at full resolution which makes viewing a bit difficult because it is like trying to see detail in a thumbnail... putting this video together required about 12 hours of work over two days... the last four hours of work was spent doing tweaking and final edits of little things...  rendering the 23 minute video and then uploading it to my Vimeo server required another few hours.  It was no simple task nor was it quick and easy but it was well worth it in the end!