On the Beach at Sullivan's Island

I took a little break the last couple days to watch some football. The Longhorns won and the Horned Frogs won. The Cowboys didn't play, but they'd won their last game, so that's good enough.

Leaving the mountains behind, I headed for Charleston on Saturday to spend a few days with Tony and Donna and, as luck would have it, we were able to watch the Longhorns beat Iowa State and Clemson beat Boston College. Ellen and David came over for dinner and football so, by the end of the evening we had a house full of well fed, happy fans.

Ellen knew I had my cameras and that I was continually on the lookout for places to shoot, so she offered to take me out to the beach on Sullivan's Island near Fort Moultrie the following evening. The idea was to catch fishing boats coming back in at sunset, but we failed to check with the fishing fleet.

I'm not quite sure why we thought we'd have a lot of boat traffic. The concept was attractive, the arrival of the fishing fleet at sunset, but it never materialized. Ah, woe is me! I was going to have to make do, shooting a pretty girl and her dog on the beach at sunset.

At least the sun didn't stand me up this time, as it had Tuesday morning at Cade's Cove. In fact, the sunset was well worth the drive out to the island. I even managed to get a boat or two in at least some of the pictures.

Ellen is showing me, in the picture above, the crab shell which held so much interest for Murphy, her West Highland Terrier.

The sun was sinking fast, so our little photo shoot ended up taking about 25 minutes - total. As much as I enjoyed Ellen's (and Murphy's) company, it's probably a good thing it didn't take very long. The gnats and/or sand fleas were out in force.

So, as the sun sank in the Atlantic, we left all the critters except Murphy where we found them and headed home.

I had one more photographic chore to do during my Charleston visit. Having seen several pictures of the marsh from the back porch of Tony's house I thought I should take the time to get the shots necessary for an HDR image. The problem was that the trees and shrubs always seem to be in silhouette because the marsh and the dock were in full sunlight.

I was surprised, therefore, when I discovered an especially well lit scene when I created a panorama of the view. I didn't need to make it HDR after all.