Lee Ann's daughter recently rented a house right on the beach at Topsail Island, N.C., and invited us to join her clan there for a few days the week after Easter. All of us hoped to be able to experience classic beachside weather.
Alas, temperatures never got quite high enough to make that possible (it's been an unusual winter-to-spring season everywhere, it seems). But there were three days of mostly sunshine, and we all used that to gaze out onto the ocean from a beachside deck. It's extraordinarily relaxing. Even more relaxing, it seems (amazingly), when there are adult beverages involved. Who knew?
Topsail Island is a 26-mile-long barrier island off the coast of southern North Carolina and is a drive of a little over 2 hours from our home outside Raleigh. The commercial hub of Topsail is Surf City, which was a 3-mile drive from where our rental house was located. (I'm pretty sure this is NOT the Surf City USA that pop singers Jan and Dean sang about in the early 1960s, even though there were some pretty wicked waves along the shore several days we were there. But I digress ...).
I picked a couple of the nicer days there to explore and photograph the commercial center as well as to pursue the expected shoreline photos. I lucked out on the very first evening when I strolled the beach during the golden hours of sundown. One of the shots from that night is the photo leading off the post. The sunrise shots you see lower in the post were taken by Lee Ann using her iPhone X. It was the only morning we were there when there wasn't serious cloud cover at sunrise.
As usual, click on any image to view a larger, sharper version. This is particularly helpful when accessing the blog from a mobile device. To view a
full gallery of images taken at Topsail Island, click on the link in this sentence.
Photo geek stuff: I shot most of the images while at Topsail Island with a Canon 6D and Tamrom 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens equipped with a B+W polarizing filter. I used an iPhone X to take a few images. For each of the shots with the 6D, I bracketed for three exposures for processing in Photomatix high-dynamic range (HDR) software. Some of the shots in this post are HDR images; some are not.
In my recent beach trips, I've gotten into these long-range beach view shots, such as the one above and two below. They provide perspective, landscape, people ... and -- with those people being quite a distance from the lens -- a little bit of mystery. Below is a shadows composition; on the left, I give viewers a tiny slice of what is causing those geometric shapes and lines.
Above: Another composition from my late-afternoon shoot on the first night. You can spot the fiery yellow and orange of the setting sun between the two houses in the middle, with the skies above it displaying the resplendent resultant colors.
I tried to do a couple sand closeup shots this time. One of them is shown above. While on a stroll non-planned photo shoot during the week, I came upon the elaborate sand castle and, to the right, moat you see in the photo below. This was taken with my iPhone.
Two views of the north end pier, the one above coming just as I hit the top of a stairs down to the beach, and the one below about 10 minutes later as I approached the pier on the beach.
Compositions from under the pier, the one above using the water and pier post lines as focal points. Below, I pulled back to make the undercarriage A-frame support beams the focal point.
Above: The pier from the opposite side.
Above: I've learned that most places require a fee of some kind to walk on their piers or fish from them. That was case in Surf City. I really wasn't looking to get on the pier (although some day, I'll fork out the cash to get pictures from the perspective of the pier back to the shore). So to get this shot of the pier walk, I squeezed the lens as best as I could through an opening in the chain link fence blocking my access.
Above: Gulls traveling over a house along the beach.
Three of Lee Ann's sunrise shots appear above and below. The one above was taken just as the top of the sphere peeked above the horizon (click on the image to pull up a larger version to appreciate the speck of bright yellow). The two below were taken within a minute or so apart as the top of the sun rose above a thin line of clouds.
I arose about 15 minutes after sunrise on the day we left, and this is what I first saw when I looked outside. We would catch a bit of rain on the return trip as we neared home.
In downtown Surf City, you'll find lots of souvenir shops (including the one above), a recreational furniture store (first below), a Sotheby's Real Estate office (second below) and an art gallery (third below), among other commercial enterprises.
Normally I'm irritated when utility lines clutter a prospective photo subject. In the case of the modest commercial mall above, I saw a novel composition -- the lines along with the buildings, with a construction crane at the far left added as a second element. And if you're wondering about that construction crane, if you walk around to the left and view the site across the street from the IGA store (not pictured here), you see the scene below.
Back to the modest commercial mall ... the above is the main access (below all those utility wires, I mean). It's in the fourth building from the left in the photo with all the wires.
Above: I snickered when I saw this sign because I'd never heard of blood worms, so I had to look it up when I got home. They are a larvae found on the bottoms of pools and ponds ... and are used as fish food. There you learned something new, if you were unaware like me.
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