Photographed at 5:45AM on the shores of the Great Slave Lake outside Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.

Technical/lighting info: one Elinchrom strobe, camera right, bounced into silver umbrella. Rising sun as a backlight. ISO 200, Canon F/2.8 70-200MM L-Series lens @175MM, F/14, 1/160-sec exposure.

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Storm clouds were spilling rain about 15 minutes before this shot, and I was lucky enough to have the rain stop, the clouds break, and the sky explode for a few fleeting minutes.

I was born in northern Alberta – about as far away from the sound of the crashing waves on a rugged shoreline as one can get in our majestic Canada – but our family had strong roots in Nova Scotia, which was the home of my parents. We would made the occasional trip to the East Coast, excited, despite being jammed (all 8 of us) into a Vanguard motorhome, a week-long saga each way that we loved; it that would bring us from the fields and trees of Fort Vermilion, Alberta, to Antigonish, Nova Scotia and my family’s cottage, which is situated in a scenic bay on the Atlantic Ocean.

Here, we lived. It gripped us. It held us. And it was with disappointment, each trip, that we would have to go back home. Not that we didn’t love home – we did – but we wanted to hold on to that ocean experience as long as we could. The sound of the waves. The feel of the sand. The smell of salt and seaweed. The sounds of guitars strumming and us all singing. The dust of the hay mound. The green of my father’s family’s fields. We loved it all. I would eventually move there, when I was in high school, and it even took a stronger hold on me.

We still go back home pretty much yearly, and now – as much as we love living here, in Canada’s north – we always love being home. And find ourselves missing the same things – the water, the smells, the ocean life – when we leave.

This photo represents for me the feeling I get when I’m there. And by “there” I mean the East Coast…I am as fond of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland (the parts of all three that I have seen) as I am Nova Scotia.   The East is my home away from home.

Used a 3-stop Singh Ray GND (Hard Stop) filter for this image.

Photographed along the Ingraham Trail outside Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.