Springtime on the Outer Banks begins today, so I may not be able to manage a daily blog, and if I do, they will be short. Our hours are long, as they should be for a photographer. After all, we want to catch not only the first light before it breaks the horizon, but light at the end of the day.

When one thinks of the Outer Banks, one often has visions of lighthouses and Blackbeard, the famous pirate of Ocracoke. We can’t conjure up Blackbeard — although some say his ghost still roams — but we do visit lighthouses along this some-200-mile-long stretch of narrow, barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina. For our workshops, we only traverse 114 miles of the 200, but that 114 miles is …

We were out scouting today, per our usual modus operandi. We have had some surprises in the past, such as then they started a major clean-up in the fishing village you saw in yesterday’s blog, or the spring “They” fixed up the old life-saving station, and they didn’t ask our permission. Of course, it looks much better to the layman, but to us photographers, it was a disaster. The sand no longer came up to the second-story windows. They put new shingles on it that weren’t weathered. They fixed the broken windows. In short, they took all the wonderful, textures that made it so interesting to photograph.

Fortunately, there were no ugly surprises this time. Phew! We walked out to Roanoke Sound on the mainland side of the Outer Banks to see another of my favorite locations. This is one where I invariably make a panorama. The breadth of the view begs to be a panorama. I’ve been watching the fishing shack, duck blind, whatever it is crumble a little bit each year. One of these days, I know we’re going to walk out and find it is no more than a rubble pile of …

We went into our favorite fishing village as we approached the Outer Banks. I always check in to ask permission to photograph here, even though the owner has given us a permanent, carte-blanche to go pretty much anywhere with our participants. No one needs to tell us the unstated rule. Fishermen always come first, and even if you are in the middle of a shot, you immediately get out of the way for these men and occasional women who scratch out a living from the sea they love so well.

There is an area in this village that the EPA has been cleaning up over the past several years. This is terrific, but it is with mixed blessing that we view it. Many of our old, favorite subjects are now …