Palm Beach (Part 1)

According to Wikipedia, Palm Beach is an "affluent" incorporated town in Palm Beach County, FL, US. According to Merriam-Webster, affluent is "having a generously sufficient and typically increasing supply of material possessions". For such a small area (only 16 miles long) it certainly does have more than its share of material possessions. I won't spend time retyping information about the town... if you're interested click the link above and Wikipedia will provide quite a bit of information, from its history, to its demographics to its "notable residents" (the latest to depart from the currently-living-there list is Bernard Madoff).

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While those that reside on the island of Palm Beach typically like to stay there, their neighbors in Palm Beach County (including me) enjoy an occasional visit because, truly, it is just beautiful over there. It's so breathtaking that I'm certain I will devote at least 3 weekly blogs during 2010 to this small piece of land surrounded by water.  This week's blog entry will document our first two bike rides that Gregg and I took along the Palm Beach bike trail. The first ride was with a borrowed bike; I enjoyed myself so much that I decided that I really really wanted my own bike. Since my birthday is coming up in February, I suggested that perhaps Gregg would like to buy me a bike for my birthday. Luckily Palm Beach has its very own bike shop where I was able to test drive what would be come my new bike!

 

First we drove along the wide walk/skate/bicycle path along the intercoastal. The view on one side is the intracoastal waterway with downtown West Palm Beach in the background and the other side is basically the back yard of homes in Palm Beach. We passed a dock just filled with seagulls... the plan was for me to sneak up on them with my camera and at my cue, Gregg scares the heck out of them so they all fly. I was pretty pleased with the results (sorry seagulls):

Before

After

We ventured away from the intracoastal and headed east toward the beach. On our way we passed Bethesda by the Sea. What an amazingly gorgeous church! I can't believe I had never been there before (and I've lived in PB County for over 25 years). Thank goodness Gregg has and he knew how much I would appreciate both the interior and exterior of the church. I didn't have my tripod with me so I didn't attempt to get inside pictures but the grounds were fantastic. I played around with multi-bracketing and tried a few hdr shots and came up with a few that I was fairly happy with (I still have a lot to learn on this technique) but in spite of the fact that I'm not entirely thrilled with them, one of them will be my Palm Beach County photo of the week on DPC.

(By the way, for a super website that explains HDR and features some incredible HDR shots, see my friend Kim's site).

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