My parents now have a winter home in the Phoenix area, so last January we stayed with them for a week or so and loved it. The pleasant temperatures, sunshine, and lack of wind made it easy to understand the annual migration of the "snowbirds."
Marly and I just got back from a quick trip to the Bradenton, Florida area. We joined friends for a lot of tennis and good company, but of course I was also hoping to do some photography. We didn't get to do much in the way of pictures, but I did manage to snap a few shots on some early morning walks in the neighborhood.
The morning after my South Carolina Photography Workshop, I hopped in the rental car at 6:00 am and drove back to Hunting Island Beach to do some more shooting on my own. I found an interesting grouping of stumps, attached my polarizing filter, and set my tripod into the wet sand.
After visiting a couple of less fruitful locations, we returned to the other end of Hunting Island Beach for a late-afternoon shoot. The low-angle sunlight provided interesting shadows cast on the sand. The only problem with shooting this time of day and in this way is getting your own shadow out of the frame!
After our sunrise shoot on Hunting Island, my February workshop in South Carolina headed inland for some sightseeing. Our first stop was the Chapel of Ease Church ruins on Saint Helena Island.
My workshop experience in South Carolina last February began with a beach shoot at sunrise. We arrived at the beach just as twilight was beginning to reveal a surreal landscape. This particular stretch of beach is strewn with the skeletons of large trees, killed and blackened by the encroaching ocean.
Last February I attended a photo workshop in South Carolina. I flew into Savannah, Georgia the evening before, and was hoping to find a nature preserve or the like on my way up to Beufort, South Carolina to get some shooting in before dark, so I headed down "Alligator Alley."
Sometimes in nature photography you are pleasantly surprised. After a beautiful sunrise, our morning in Theodore Roosevelt National Park looked bleak, light-wise. Clouds obscured the sun's golden morning light and I thought landscape photography was going to be a bust. Instead I ended up getting one of my favorite shots of the trip.
In a previous post, I mentioned creating a high-dynamic-range image using multiple exposures. In this post I want to show an example of one of my favorite digital photography techniques: Creating an HDR image from just one RAW capture.