A pictorial toast to street performers

There's a funny story (OK, perhaps only slightly funny) to the genesis of today's post. I'll try to make it brief. 

While working at my online site at SmugMug.com, I was organizing a gallery involving street performers I'd photographed in the past. It had not occurred to me until doing this work on the gallery that I photographed a flute player in Savannah twice -- and four years apart. And each time, he was performing on the riverwalk along River Street. 

The first time was on Feb. 1, 2018 (see photo leading off the post). He was wearing a red, black, gray and white checkered long-sleeve shirt, light blue jeans and a small fedora with a feather on top. I'm sure I came across him while doing a walk-around the riverwalk area that day.

The next time was on March 30, 2022 (see photo above), and I spied him not far from where the Savannah River cruise ship, The Georgia Queen, was docking after Lee Ann and I had been on a leisurely trip along the river close to where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. We were still on the cruiser when I took this photo. This time, the musician was wearing a white shirt, gray pants and a ship captain's hat. 

Interestingly, each time I photographed him, I happened to catch him looking my way at least once in my pictures. (see first two photos below). Nevertheless, it did not occur to me in 2022 that I had seen this guy on the 2018 visit. That lightning bolt struck Tuesday of this week as I was organizing the aforementioned street performers photo gallery, a link to which you'll find in this sentence. 

I figured that while relating this story, I'd go ahead an offer some more photos from the street performances gallery here. So below are some other shots. Most, I might add, were taken in Savannah, where there are quite a few such performers at various spots along the riverwalk. 

The fellow above and below I remember only by his first name, Mike, even though he told me his full name at the time I took these photos in October 2011. I even did a post about him ... in 2013, two years after the fact! I encountered him while doing a photo shoot along Mass Ave in Indianapolis. As the 2013 post mentions, Mike told me at the time he was leaving for Europe the next day. I've always wondered what became of him ... 

   

We're back in Savannah for the next few performers. I did not catch any of their names, unfortunately. But the guys in the photo above, below and second and third photos below all were stationed at some point along the riverwalk. I came upon the guy above on March 7, 2017, which coincided with my first-ever visit to Savannah. The next two performers, very animated in their a cappella delivery, were photographed Feb. 1, 2018, the same day I first photographed the flute player in the lead-off photo. 

The horn player above and below I came across in Savannah's Forsyth Square, the largest (by far) of the city’s almost two dozen neighborhood one-block parks, or squares. The photo date was Dec. 14, 2017. On that same date, in one of the smaller neighborhood squares, I came across a saxophone player dressed as Santa entertaining a young boy and his mother (second and third photos below). 

Above: This performer I came across in Savannah on the far western end of the riverwalk on April 1, 2022. 

Above and below: We briefly leave music in order to transition to painting with this guy, who is bundled up on a cold autumn day, Nov. 16, 2018, to be exact. He was demonstrating his craft in one of one-block neighborhood squares in Savannah. The bottom photo is a cropped version of the one above.

Above and below: Still in Savannah for these shots, again in Forsyth Square, but on March 29, 2022. 

Above and below: The last performer in this post was another sax player, this time on the pier at Waterfront Park in Charleston, S.C. I came across him on March 10, 2017. We stopped in Charleston after leaving Savannah that month before returning to North Carolina.  

A salute to Hershel Saylor, the photo club colleague with the 3D camera

In the early part of the 2010s, I was an active member of two photography clubs in Indianapolis. On Saturday, while perusing some pictures of mine from that era, I happened to think of a particular fellow who was a member of one of the clubs, the Indy Meetup Photo Club. So I went online to see if I could find a way to contact him just to see how he was doing.

In my search for that one piece of information, I was saddened to learn something entirely different about Hershel Saylor: He had passed away in 2020, almost five years to the day. 

Hershel was someone from the club who stuck with me through the years because of a photographic innovation of his — and I think he told me he concocted it himself — which was to shoot three dimensional photos. The tool, or camera, he used to do this was actually two cameras connected side by side. Every composition he made appeared on each camera’s LCD screen, side by side (see photo leading off the post).  

I don't recall studying his results back then to know or appreciate whether the 3D objective really worked or succeeded, but I remember him trying to explain to me how it was supposed to work, and how that explanation went over my head. 

Hershel was a tech geek of sorts, so I guess his tech-speak didn’t land anywhere close to the comprehension center of my brain. It probably wasn’t his fault; it was just the feeble nature of my ability to absorb geek talk in an understanding way. 

In 2015, a year or so after I had left the clubs, I dropped Hershel an email when I saw a couple of athletes with the surname Saylor at Indianapolis Roncalli High School being mentioned a lot in the sports section of the local newspaper. I asked him if he was related to either of them by chance. 

After kindly mentioning how it was good to hear from me and that he and his wife, Deb, who also was a member of the IMUPC, have spoken of me “quite a few times since the camera club,” he confirmed that the two Saylor athletes I had been reading about were children of a nephew of his. 

He then told me that he’d been doing some work for WHMB TV (Channel 40 in Indianapolis) for the station’s Friday sports broadcast. 

I found his obituary online and enjoyed a wonderful pictorial tribute that his family had arranged to display on the page. It included a few photos of Hershel holding his 3D camera, two more of which I'll provide immediately below. All three photos are from the pictorial tribute, incidentally.

After viewing the tribute, I went into my photo archives to see if I had any photos of Hershel from our days together in the photo club, and it turns out, I did. I’ll present them below, although none of them shows him using his special camera. 

It occurred to me while composing this post that the club never devoted a meeting (at least none that I had attended) for Hershel to introduce and demonstrate his 3D camera operation. It certainly would have been worth considering doing so, given that the club welcomed all topics related to the craft for its meetings.

Above, Hershel and fellow IMUPC member Bill Riggs peruse some of the images our club was putting up for sale at the 2011 rendition of the annual Christmas Market hosted by the Joy of All Who Sorrow Church at 16th and Delaware streets in Indianapolis. The photo below was taken at another point that evening at the Market. 

Six days after that event, the IMUPC had its annual club Christmas get-together, which is when I took photo above. The same month as the above Christmas Market and our club Christmas get-together, club members had a night outing in Zionsville to shoot holiday decorations, and that's where I shot the first photo below.

On June 16, 2012, Hershel and wife Deb joined club members in relaxing and enjoying refreshments after a full day of shooting the second then-annual Hendricks County Park2Park running race in which teams of six took turns running splits of a 60+ mile course starting at a county park at one end of the county and finishing in a county park at the other end. Below, in another photo from the obituary page photo tribute, Hershel enjoys the camaraderie of a fellow club member, Fred (his surname escapes me now), during the Park2Park shoot. 

Myrtle Beach, Part III: June 7 sunrise

If you’re a regular follower of this blog, you probably have seen a lot of my sunrise and sunset (mostly the former) shots from various trips to the East Coast over the past decade or so. 

I’ve gotten so many, in fact, I finally decided to drop quite a few of them in separate Sunrise and Sunset subfolders in my Objects folder at my photo site at SmugMug.com.

Last week, while in Myrtle Beach, S.C., for a family get-together of R&R, there were no sunrises to speak of for the first portion of the week because of heavy cloud cover in the early minutes of dawn and daylight. 

Then on Thursday, it rained most of the day. Instead of spending time at the beach, we took the grandchildren to Ripley’s Aquarium of Myrtle Beach at Broadway at the Beach, an inland shopping mall built around a large pond, not unlike Barefoot Landing mentioned in the previous post (although I like the layout and aesthetics of the latter much better). 

Friday was another strikeout because of dense cloud-cover. But on Saturday, which was checkout day, even though there were clouds along the horizon, there was an opening that allowed for the photos you see in this post, and I went to work documenting it with my iPhone 13 Pro from the balcony of our fourth-floor hotel, looking northeast. 

The photo leading off the post, the third and final installment of this brief three-post series, was taken near the end of my series of sunrise photos. As you can see, the horizon was still densely populated with clouds, but the sun found a way to reward me for waiting so long.

Before proceeding with other photos involving the sun itself, I’ll go back in time about 10 minutes before sunrise and present a shot of the sky exhibiting a spectacular array of color and cloud streaks (see first photo below). I made several compositions of this, and the one in this post struck me as the best.

In the second photo below, the sun is above the horizon, but the lower clouds are blocking it from appearing. You can see the intense orange color at the spot, though. We finally see sun in the third photo below. Photos four, five, six and seven below are next in order.  

For the shot above, I pulled way back on the focal range because I wanted to show the sky situation in tandem with the sunrise. The first shot below was taken immediately after the one above. The last photo below was the third last one I took.

Myrtle Beach, Part II: 3 other shops at Barefoot Landing

While we were at Barefoot Landing at the Waterfront in North Myrtle Beach, we spent a chunk of time in two stores, Christmas Mouse and Toy Kingdom, and I darted into a third shop quickly to get photos to verify the Purpleologist shop’s boast of being a “Lover of All Things Purple.”

I’ll start with Christmas Mouse, an all-things Christmas shop that I’d mentioned in my 2021 post on Barefoot Landing at the Waterfront, so I won’t devote a lot of pictures in this post about it other than the photo leading off the post, the two that conclude this store’s section of the post ... and a series of photos showing a curious “find” for those in our family who happen to be fans of the late Bob Ross, the painter who hosted the PBS television show The Joy of Painting from 1983-94.

Our “finds” were a figurine (first photo below) and various Christmas ornaments featuring Ross, which appear in photos below the figurine. 

One of the two other non-Bob Ross photos I took this trip at Christmas Mouse that I’ll feature here is interesting yuletide tree decorated in all silver ornaments (first photo below). To the left of the tree, is a display of silver-colored decoration options, available to purchase, to use for doing the same thing with your tree at home ... or to use in any other manner the buyer chooses, of course. A photo of the full wall of those decorations appears below the one of the tree. Click on the images to bring up larger versions of these or any photos in the blog. 

Next up is the Toy Kingdom, which we decided to check out to entertain the toddlers in our group and possibly to come up with kids’ gift ideas for Christmas 2025. The last photo in this section, the one of the stuffed lion, actually sat outside the entrance and greeted visitors. 

Last but not least, is Purpleologist, Lover of All Things Purple. And my quick dart inside — which took no more than a minute — proved that the boast is true to its word. The entirety of my shoot there, all of four photos (one of which is the exterior), appears below. 

Coming tomorrow, Myrtle Beach, Part III: June 7 sunrise