The Year that Was 2022 — Stories Behind My Favorite Images of 2022 (Part 1 — Lowcountry Living)

Happy Holidays everyone!

It has been another great year for my photography. Looking back, I am frankly amazed at just how many images from this year can make it into my personal favorites. Although I have been doing landscape photography for more than a few years now, the last two years probably saw the biggest jump in the quality of my images. I’ve made great progress in almost every aspect of my photography from planning my shots and locations and all the way through editing.

This was also the first year I seriously tried to sell my work at art fairs and other venues. This experience helped me get over the concerns of whether I was good enough (impostor syndrome is not unusual with photogrphers). I even dipped my toes in doing commission work (I am grateful to the customers that trusted me with this). In short, as I mentioned above, it has been a great year.

So, to celebrate the end of the year, here are the stories behind some of my favorites from 2022. Since there were so many, I had to break this into several parts. This part will focus on images taken in South Carolina during a workshop in Charleston at the end of march.

Special shout out to Kate Silvia and Kenny McKeithan who led the workshop in Charleston. Make sure to check them out. So, without further ado…

Click on the image to go to a product page. As I look back at 2022, is amazing just how many images that I love I took this year. I had to work hard to reduce this list to a manageable level.

Arthur Ravenel Jr. bridge is a staple of Charleston. We came there for a sunset shoot after spending some time at the famous Rainbow Row in Downtown Charleston. And, boy, did the sunset delver. The beautifully lit clouds with made the location one of my best experiences this year.

Sunset at the Arthur Ravenel Jr Bridge, Charleston, South Carolina

The shot on the right is a panorama of six images taken with a long 150mm (225mm equivalent) lens. The light from the sunset on the left, just outside the frame, gives this image a kind of cynematic look you sometimes see in the initial establishing shots. A perfect way to kick off my top choices. After we were done, and other participants went to rest before an early shoot the next day, I stayed behind. First, I went up the bridge, and then returned to our sunset spot for a night shot. Although I love the night lit bridge by itself, I think that the clouds that day gave this image just that extra kick to bring it into my top twelve for the year. I should point out here, that I have several more great images of this bridge, which did not make it to this list.

A Night Shot of Arthur Ravenel Jr Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina.

After doing a sunrise shoot at Folly Beach the next morning, we went to visit the Magnolia Plantation. This plantation is amazing and offers a variety of great shots of the live oaks, cypresses and various flowers. For the purposes of this list, I chose two of the more unusual shots I took there. The black and white image of the live oak was taken with a long lens (again). I have a color version of the same shot that I also like, but I just think that the black and white version with the edit to mimic an infrared shot brings that something extra to the shot.

Live Oak at Magnolia Plantation in Monochrome.

The second image from the Magnolia Plantation surprised me. I am used to water looking like glass when you take a long exposure, and this was what I expected when I took this image. However, apparently water and leaves moved enough on the surface to create these amazing streaks. This was enough to get the image to my top choices list.

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Circles on the Water at the Magnolia Plantation

On the last day of the workshop we went to the bone-yard beach at Botany Bay for sunrise. As people spread out, I found myself a nice dead tree placed right at the edge of the surf. As the sun came up, I kept shooting, experimenting with different shutter speeds until I was happy with the result. During one of the art shows I participated this year, a customer mentioned that they saw a couple sitting at the top of the root, watching the sunrise. Ever since then I cannot unsee it.

Sunrise at the Bone-Yard Beach at Botany Bay

After we finished at Botany Bay, on our way back to Charleston we stopped at the Angel Oak tree. This amazing like oak is estimated to be 400-500 years old, and it stands over 60ft tall and over 25 feet in circumference. It dwarfs the people standing next to it. The location was teaming with people, but I managed to take a few shots without a crowd. I especially love a series of shots of the branches of this amazing tree reaching for the sun. One of these makes an appearance on this “favorite” list.

Reaching for the Sun. Angel Oak Tree near Charleston.

Azaleas and Cypress Trees at the Cypress Gardens

Finally, after finishing up the workshop and before leaving South Carolina, I stopped at the cypress gardens. It is another amazing location near Charleston, and I had a blast photographing it. I had the benefit of great light although it was in the middle of the day. Out of the many shots that I love, which I took that day, I chose one to include on this list. The combination of the white azaleas and the cypress trees in the background is just something special.

As i already mentioned, narrowing down the list of my favorites was very hard this year, and many great images I took during my several days in Charleston didn’t make it onto the list.

If you would like to see more images from South Carolina, be sure to check out my South Carolina gallery.

Happy Holidays!

Field Trip to Night Lights at New England Botanic Garden (Tower Hill) and How to Use Long Exposure for Creative Effect and to Remove People from Shots

It’s the time of year when lights and light shows come out to celebrate the holiday season. This year was the first time I went to the Tower Hill Botanic Garden to see the Night Lights decorations. The visit was as part of the field trip with the Worcester County Camera Club, though I arrived a bit later than everybody else.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display Main Garden

The displays at the garden are beautiful and offer a variety of subjects to get your creative juices flow. Night photography of this type brings a set of challenges in addition to those you would have under normal lighting conditions. And then, there are a lot of people walking around, enjoying the show and the atmosphere, who you would not necessarily want in your shots.

Let’s get the easy things out of the way. All the normal composition “rules” apply, so I am not going to dwell on that. If allowed, bring a tripod. Granted, many cameras from the last five years both have a good low-light performance, and have sensor stabilization. If you have one of those, you might get away with hand-holding your camera. My camera is about twelve years old and has pretty bad low light performance. While it does have image stabilization, it is probably a couple of stops. Good, but not nearly enough. So, it is a tripod for me. In addition, if you want to shoot long exposure like the shot above, you would need a tripod anyway (but more about it below).

Trees Lit with Colorful Lights at the Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display

One of the challenges when shooting this type of scenes is getting the white balance right. Now, many newer cameras have a good automatic white balance, so, this might not be an issue. Mine is a hit and miss under these conditions. So, if you wanted another reason to shoot RAW rather than JPEG, white balance is it. Adjusting white balance later in Lightroom to suit your taste and to match the scene colors the way you remember them is easy.

Another pitfall you would not necessarily think of when considering night light displays is that they are very high dynamic range. Now, if you don’t mind blowing the highlights at the lights or losing all the details in the night sky or shadowy areas, that’s not a problem. However, generally, you want those. Or at least you want the option to decide later when you edit your shot. So, I suggest bracketing the images just in case. And that’s another reason to have a tripod. Now, I shoot exposure bracketed images hand-held all the time (mostly because I am lazy to get my tripod out), but that’s when you have enough light or when you need a fast shutter speed for other reasons, such as freezing movement in your shot.

Night Lights displays automatically lend themselves to sun-stars effect. If you don’t know what it is, that’s the spokes around the lights in the first image above. Those happen naturally to a varying degree as you close down your aperture, which you tend to do anyway if you want to get everything in your image in focus. The number of spokes corresponds to double the number of aperture blades on your lens and some lenses have more beautiful sun-stars than others.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden Night Light Display

Finally, what do you do when there are a lot of people that you don’t want in your shots? Well, you can wait if you are very patient and lucky. A little hard to do if there are a lot of people like on the night when I was at the Tower Hill, and especially if it is pretty cold and you can freeze your butt off waiting. You could also shoot many shots with people passing through and then try to remove people in Photoshop by combining the different shots. Doable, but sometimes can be cumbersome. And finally, you can use long exposure.

We’ve all seen images of water smoothed out by long exposure to give it that ethereal look or the shots with streaks of clouds to show movement. In our case, you want your exposure to be long enough so the people passing through your frame don’t register. Or at least don’t register enough to see like in the shots above, all of which were taken with a thirty second exposures. You do need to experiment with this, as you can get “ghosts” if your exposure is too short or the people are too slow. So, make sure to check before you leave. In my case, thirty seconds were generally enough during this trip, but if not, use neutral density filters to slow your shutter speed down even more if you need to.

Old South Church in Boston

Arthur Ravenel Jr Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina

You can, of course, use the long, or “longish” shutter speeds for other creative purposes such as creating the light streaks from cars like in the image above taken at the Old South Church in Boston or the one on the right taken at the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in Charleston.

For this, you will need to experiment (strange how often that’s the answer to our questions about what works best in photography). The reason is that you want your shutter speed to correspond to the speed the cars are moving in your frame. This will also be complicated by the focal length you are using. So, for example, the shot in Boston was taken at ten seconds, while the one in Charleston was fifteen seconds.

And just to have some fun at the end of this post, here are a couple of shots I took at Gloucester Cathedral during my trip last spring. These corridors were used to shoot scenes in the Harry Potter movies. So, naturally, I wanted to fill them with ghosts. To do that, I took several longer exposures with me walking into the frame for parts of the exposure, until I got the effect I wanted. And then, I combined several images in Photoshop to place the “ghosts” in different locations in the frame.

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

Ghosts at the Gloucester Cathedral