Shutter Shock: Beach Weather

Michigan is still rocking winter, but today I decided to be brave and go outside. I rather dislike taking photos inside, so I put my boots on, hopped in my car and went to one place I felt could be interesting, Grand Haven beach.
I'm generally not a beach person, but the beach usually looks pretty sweet in the winter with the ice and how the waves carve away at the frozen sand. Sadly today it wasn't as sweet as I would have liked. It was a bit too snowy still to walk too far out on the beach, but it wasn't snowing or raining like the forecast said so it wasn't too bad.

Most of the pictures I took today were on the pier. For about half of my shots I used manual mode. I wanted to play with more settings, but my fingers quickly got frozen and for the sake of not having them fall off, all I messed with was shutter speed and aperture. Eventually I just couldn't take it anymore and I put my hobo gloves back on and shot in aperture priority mode.

I'm going to post photos two at a time and comment on what I was attempting with the shots and how things did or didn't work out:

Exposure fail! It has been a long time since I've used a camera in full manual mode and remembering to change shutter speed for correct exposure was not my friend today. I wanted to shoot this building at the end of the pier because the paint was starting to chip and I thought getting lots of the detail in the image would be cool. Plus I like the color red. I increased my f-stop for more detail, but the first shot I forgot to change my shutter speed and it resulted in a way underexposed image. The second shot turned out much better, but I really should have gotten closer to get more detail on the building.

The first image here was my favorite of the day. Most likely because I was rocking the small depth of field yet again. But I also really enjoy how I captured some of the wear on the lifesaver. Also there is just something about lighthouses and lifesavers that go together. I also tried to use the black structure that the lifesaver was hung on to help frame the little lighthouse in the back. The second image I tried to increase the depth of field and get the background and most of the foreground in focus. Not the most impressive image, but good practice.

This was the building in my first two pictures. It was at the very end of the pier and I decided to try to use the steel walkway thing as a cool leading line towards it. Besides the fact that the first shot here is slightly off-center, it's not that interesting. There is a bit too much dead space for my liking and I'm just not a fan of it. So for the next image I tried to work the rule of thirds into the shot. I think the result is a lot more interesting.

Now here are some more pictures that I'm not going to comment much about because:

A. you're probably tired of reading

B. I'm tired of typing.