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.