Return trips to Duplin Winery and Wrightsville Beach ... with a giant frying pan thrown in for good measure

Even before moving to North Carolina this summer, Lee Ann and I were acquainted with Duplin Winery in Rose Hill, which sits almost halfway between both Raleigh and Wilmington.

We'd stopped there a couple years ago en route to Cary from Wrightsville Beach (which is near Wilmington) and enjoyed our visit. We also visited Duplin's sister location in North Myrtle Beach, S.C., earlier this year during our East Coast trip that included stops in Savannah, Charleston and the Myrtle Beach area. And we've bought Duplin wines from the shelves of local grocery stores.

Duplin is North Carolina's oldest winery, dating to 1976. It is known for using Muscadine grapes to produce an expansive selection of sweet wines, a good number of which are distributed to retail outlets in the state and a few adjacent states. The original site in Rose Hill also has a bistro that serves food during lunch hours.

For several months after moving to North Carolina in 2017, we promised each other we'd pull away for a short trip (a two-hour drive) to the ocean with a stop at Duplin in between, but the arduous task of unpacking compounded by necessary return trips to Indianapolis to tidy up loose ends on the move there, not even one trip ever happened.

But on Oct. 24, shortly after returning from our most recent trip to Indy, we decided to do the day trip to the ocean. We stopped at the winery on the way, joined the winery's Heritage Club while there, then proceeded further south to Wrightsville Beach before returning home at dusk.

We tasted 12 wines at Duplin, only one or two of which we remembered from our tasting there two years ago. The winery is also festooned for the holidays (and I don't mean Thanksgiving -- see photos at left and below), and tickets to the dozen or so performances of its annual Country Christmas Revue, which begin next weekend, were nearly sold out already.

One of the wines available in the first batch of wines we received with our membership was called "Forty," a limited-edition white sweet wine produced to mark the winery's 40th anniversary -- and priced at $40 a bottle. It is undoubtedly one of the best sweet whites I've ever had; we each had a glass of it, which came free as another perk of our membership (members get one free glass with each visit). Those are our glass of "Forty" you see in the photo leading off the post. Below is a photo of the main area with tasting bar. This is where club members meet for the quarterly wine-release pickups, we're told.

While in Rose Hill, which boasts on its roadside welcome signs that it is home to the largest frying pan in the world, we pulled off the highway to briefly check out the frying pan. It was mostly covered under a pavilion in a town park, apparently exposed only during special community celebrations. That's the pavilion in the first photo below, and a closeup of the "frying pan" (the handle is closest to the camera) in the second photo below.

I had been eager to return to the Fish House Grill in Wrightsville Beach, where a couple years ago I enjoyed what I considered the best fish and chips meal I've ever had. You can imagine our disappointment when we got to Fish House and looked through the menu only to find that the fish and chips was no longer there.

We asked our server about it, and he said it had been removed in June. He said the meal was very popular, "but it wasn't cost-effective."

Lee Ann and I talked about what that could possibly mean, and the only thing we could think of was that the price of the wonderful fish they used had gone up and they couldn't justify passing along the cost increase to customers. I ended up getting a blackened mahi mahi, but it wasn't the same.

Because we so enjoyed the trip to Duplin, we made another visit there on Nov. 2, this time to dine at the bistro. The bistro's special of the day was a fried pork chop, which I've never had before. So I was game. Unfortunately, it was not as good as I had hoped it would be.

All of the photos in this post were taken with my iPhone 6s Plus.

Above: A portion of the seating area at Duplin's bistro.

Above: My fried pork chip, served with sliced zucchini and squash and rice topped with gravy.  

Above: Lee Ann's pulled pork topped with coleslaw and served with french fries.

At the Fish House Grill in Wrightsville Beach, we started with some fried calamari (above). My entree, the blackened mahi mahi, is below. Lee Ann's order of crab cakes is second below.

Above: The Fish House is along the intracoastal waterway, and on this day, the blue table umbrellas (which protect against seagulls diving in to grab food from your table) made for a pattern composition, I thought.

Above and below: Shots from Wrightsville Beach. 

Intracoastal waterway, Wrightsville Beach

This third post from my visit to the Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach area of North Carolina last month focuses on the shoot around the intracoastal waterway along Airlie Avenue.

I happened to be on Airlie on July 7 because I had lunch that day at the Fish House Grill, 1410 Airlie Ave., which overlooks the waterway. I enjoyed one of the best fish and chips meal that I've had in a long time. I'm not sure what factors weighed into the decision to dine there; two nearby options, I've been told, would have been good ones as well -- the Dockside and Bridge Tender restaurants.

There was an array of boats moored in slips along this section of the waterway, as evidenced by the photo leading off the post, which I believe is part of the Bridge Tender Marina. That's the Fish House Grill in the background; there'll be a few more photos of the restaurant below.

While dining, a gull or two perched themselves on a couple of wooden posts near the shoreline, so I spent a few moments capturing pictures of them while waiting for food to arrive. The U.S. 74 bridge over the waterway even opened up to allow a vessel to pass through while I was dining. You can see it opened in the background of one of the gull photos.

For a full look at the waterway shoot, visit my site at SmugMug.

Above and next two below: Different views of the Bridge Tender restaurant, which partners with the Bridge Tender Marina nearby.

Above and below: The U.S. 74 drawbridge over the waterway, one full view shot, and another of some boats approaching to pass under it.  

Above and next two below: Shots of the Fish House Grill. An exterior shot (above) and two pictures (below) taken from my table.

Above and below: One of the gull visitors; both photos were taken from my table while waiting for the meal to arrive.

Above and below: Two more drawbridge shots, one featuring a runner passing on the sidewalk above, the other with a few more crafts passing underneath it on the waterway.

Another Wrightsville Beach (NC) sunrise

Photography outings and opportunities have been few and far between in recent months, and for the time being, that's OK by me. I'm enjoying the hiatus, although so much is happening around me outside of photography that I'm not sure I'd have been able to squeeze picture-taking into the agenda even if I had wanted to.

I did indulge in quite a bit of camera work in early July when I returned to North Carolina for 12 days or so. Those of you who follow this blog will recall I made my first trip there in July 2014.

This year's trip included a couple days back at Wrightsville Beach, my first stop last year; a couple sessions (some candid, some portraiture) with Lee Ann's 8-month-old granddaughter, Elizabeth; a Cary, N.C. (where I spent the majority of my time); a visit to downtown Wilmington, N.C.; and a side trip to the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

The trip to Wrightsville Beach included another sunrise photo shoot, and this post features pictures from that. Pictures taken along the intracoastal waterway in Wrightsville Beach as well as samples of the shoots in Cary, Wilmington and at UNC will appear here in the days ahead.

Gearwise, I traveled light for this trip. For all of my North Carolina shots except the portraitures of Elizabeth, I used my Canon 6D and Tamron 28-300mm f.3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens and bracketed my images for varying exposures of each composition so I could treat the images in high-dynamic range (HDR) software during post-processing.

The Tamron is such a handy, versatile tool for when I know I'm going to be on my feet for long periods of time and I don't want to carry around a lot of gear ... and/or when I want to bracket my exposures without lugging around a tripod. Tamron's PZD (piezoelectric drive) and its VC technology in the lens (both of which also are found in the 18-270mm that I use on my Canon 7D crop-sensor camera) does a very good job keeping things still when I do two or three exposures for a shot. And even on those occasions when there is too much shake or too slow of a shutter speed (the former will occur when the lens is zoomed to the 250+ range), the lastest version of Photomatix HDR software that I use now provides a deghosting tool that corrects motion blur almost perfectly. The great thing about that tool is that it allows you to select which frame of the multiple exposures you took for the software to pick when blending the exposures.

For the portraiture shots of Elizabeth, I used the same camera but turned to a Sigma 85mm f/2.8 lens, which I've had for a couple years but never really explored to the degree I did with the pictures of Elizabeth in July. I was very impressed with how the Sigma performed; I had some great bokeh, and the images were crisp and professional looking.

OK, back to this post ...

The sunrise and intracoastal waterway photos at Wrightsville Beach were taken July 7. Those of you who follow PP might remember that I also shot a sunrise, my first ever, at the same location almost a year ago. In that instance, I mistimed it; I didn't arrive to shoot until the sun had already crept above the horizon. Because of that, I was in a rush and started tripping the shutter quickly and instinctively -- before getting away from the hotel's seagull sonar wires.

This time, I was better prepared. I arrived early and managed to get an elevated position on the other side of the wires, closer to the shoreline atop a wooden deck which was above the natural berm. I got several shots of the colored sky before the sphere became visible.

The photo leading off the post was well into the shoot, but it probably best represents the sunrise collection. I decided to use the lifeguard station as my frame complement and viewer perspective, so you'll see it included in the first several pictures. The changing colors of the sky and clouds as the sphere made its slow ascent (see five photos immediately below) gave me a varied representation of the moment.

You can see images from the full sunrise shoot at my SmugMug travel gallery.

Above: In the moments before the sun inched above the water, the sky colors immediately above the horizon were drenched in rich oranges and purples.

Above: Several of the full-zoom shots of the sun just as it cleared the horizon reflected an overlay of what I have to presume is a low-lying cloud cluster (click on the image to enlarge and get a better view). At first, I thought the objects in the center resembled the silhouettes of a ship or two, but that wouldn't have explained the much larger object on the extreme right. And besides, I don't remember seeing any craft or vessel in the vicinity of this area in the moments before or after the sun slipped above the horizon.

Above and next two below: Two more images taken moments before the sunrise but using something other than the lifeguard station as the subject. The metal hunter in the two images above got into a lot of my shots, sometimes by choice, other times because I was momentarily boxed in for the composition and had to include him. The presunrise image immediately above also gives a sense of the haze hovering low to the ground/water on this morning. The haze will become more evident in pictures further down in the post. The athlete in the first image below was running away from the sunrise. The pier in the photo below that also was in the direction opposite the sunrise from my vantage point. This frame, too, gives a little sense of the haze.

Above and next six images: The sun had risen, so I started to compose to integrate the low-to-the-ground haze into my photos. Using a 28-300mm lens enabled me to exploit the zoom compression that explains the varying degree of sharpness and separation that you see in the photos, i.e., people up close are mostly clear and out of the haze, whereas those farther back are cloaked in various degrees of it.   

Above and below: I used this walker to compose several frames, and in the images above and below, I also demonstrate the subtleties between an image processed in HDR software (above) vs. one reflecting a single frame (below). The primary difference is that the HDR-treated image carries a slight full-body halo that gives it separation and better line distinction from the sand. I'm not saying this is necessarily better, because it certainly is less realistic. But artistically, you are more inclined at first to view the walker differently than you might in the image below. The walker in these images is headed in the general direction of the sunrise, but not directly so.

Above: Here is the same walker coming toward me. Because I'm not shooting into a direction where the sun is located, there is less silhouetting, and while there is haze, it's not as pronounced as it was above.  

Above: This image was taken shortly after the one of the walker above it. It is simply a bit to the right of it. With the subjects closer to the camera, the separation really illustrates the amount of haze.

Above and below: Two post-sunrise shots taken toward the ocean, but away from the sun.

Above and below: Two post-sunrise images, one pointed directly at the sun, the other a few minutes later when the sun slipped behind some clouds.