Myrtle Beach, Part III: Springmaid Pier

 A perk of visiting the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach was approximately a city block from the museum itself. And with temperatures in the mid-60s to low 70s most of our trip to Myrtle Beach in mid-December, it proved to be the perk we had anticipated. 

We had a busy first full day in Myrtle Beach, which was Saturday, Dec. 11. The afternoon began with a stop at the museum, after which we strolled the short distance to the beach alongside Springmaid Pier on the city's Southside. The pier is featured in the photo leading off the post.

There was a small group trying to get kites into the air when we arrived. Those efforts are illustrated in the first five pictures below, culminating with a closeup of the red-shirted youth's kite, which I shot into the afternoon sun, drawing a lot of unwanted chromatic aberration. 

Later, as the subsequent pictures show, I had fun photographing a couple of dogs that were with a family sitting along the beach as well as some seagulls -- on the beach and in the air -- as well as some people walking under and along the pier. For the latter, I again positioned myself to shoot into backlight for several of these subjects in pursuit of a recent technique binge for silhouettes. The shot of the beach with the thick haze in front of the hotels and resorts in the background was not a backlight situation, but I still felt it was worth exploring a monochrome treatment. 

To view a full gallery of images from the beach shoot near Springmaid Pier, follow the link in this sentence.  

Next: Holiday Market at Market Common

Previously in the series:

Part I: Sunrises 

Part II: Frank G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum 

A few more ... from 15 miles out

I decided to post a few more frames from the "15 Miles Out" shoot, one to assure those of you bothered by the basketball hoop composition in the previous post. I actually did grab a shot or two (included in this post) with the composition set up as one might primarily expect. And yeah, even with my contrarian mood, it still gnawed at me a little that I didn't go ahead and just use that one with the original post, so ... I'm making up for that here. But rather than simply swap it out as an edit to the previous post, I'll include the "properly aligned" one here and let the viewers judge.

Also in this post are another shot of a jet stream as it appears to make contact with the church tower. Again ... a mere juxtaposition. Not to worry; no 9/11 disaster intended or suggested.

And, a color shot of the neat glow (from backlight) behind the Pleasant Valley Church steeple (the lead image above), and a black-and-white conversion of the solitary, leafless tree (can the color version be far behind?). I had provided versions of each of these images treated with an antique filter in the previous post.

Finally, I'm also including a frame featuring a fortuitous natural sun spotlight on harvest foliage from the field near the church. I did no playing with this in post-processing; this is exactly how the light fell on the subject.

To view a full gallery of images from this shoot, follow the link in this sentence.

Above: The juxtaposition of jet stream and church steeple. The jet was miles and miles away. 

Above: The sun-spotlighted harvest foliage.

Above: A black-and-white monochrome of the leafless tree.

Above: The basketball hoop and Pleasant Valley Church sign, "properly" aligned.

This 'stretch' wasn't such a bad thing

Anyone who's tried to use and display a digital image for their pc or mac desktop art knows the disappointment of not being able to select one that orients vertically unless you're willing to live with distortion or radical disorientation. If you pick a vertical/portrait image, then go to try to fill the whole monitor space with it by selecting the "stretch" option, the skew is abhorrent, and particularly so if the image contains a face or animal. You can center it, if you really want to use it, but it just doesn't have the same impact as filling the full screen.

Your pc/mac monitor usually is square or rectangular, so if you want the image to fill the full space on your monitor, using the "stretch" function, you're left to pick a horizontal, or landscape, shape. You probably can find plenty images in that orientation. In fact, that's what I've done for the past dozen years or so. Until two weeks ago.

I am quite fond of a backlighted vertical image from my Feb. 6 shoot in Garfield Park in Indianapolis, a sunny day that followed an overcast, full day of snowfall. On a lark, I grabbed the image to see how it would display "stretched" on my monitor as my desktop art. I was incredibly and pleasantly surprised. It gave the snow-covered ground a more prominent posture, and it elevated the background trees on the right to a position of a significant secondary element. Finally, when I looked at the image on my desktop, I could appreciate the tiny snow flecks sprinkled throughout the trunks and limbs of the subject trees in the foreground. And it almost seemed as if they sparkled.

I created a digital file of the "stretched" version by capturing a screen grab (after hiding all the desktop icons) and converting the ensuing image from bitmap to jpeg. The result of the conversion of the screen grab to jpeg appears above this post; the original image with the vertical orientation appears below.

Every picture tells a story: Finding unexpected value

Backlighted photos you don't have the time to set up properly might end up in the discard pile a lot. But with some work and care in post-processing, sometimes you can come up with wonderful silhouettes or beautiful portraits with such images. This is a story about one such photo; the image might not be very spectacular, but it is one I'm glad I didn't toss.

I strive to shoot available light when possible, even for indoor family gatherings. I did so on Thanksgiving, and although the end result from those pictures was satisfying, I didn't arrive at the "end result" until after a lot of post-processing work with editing software. Even using an ISO of 1600 and a lens with a wide aperture (f/1.8), I still had difficulty getting enough light for optimum exposure in the living room, dining room and the grandchildren's playroom on Thanksgiving. With 150+ pictures, it entailed considerable work.

I wanted to avoid so much post-processing editing for the Christmas get-together. So on Thursday, I decided to use Gary Fong's "Puffer" light diffuser on the pop-up flash on my Canon 30D. I knew I'd miss that natural look in ambient-light photos, but the Puffer delivered decent exposures, didn't white-out people's faces from using a straight-on pop-up flash, and left me far less work afterward. Oh, it also helped that I shot about 50 fewer pictures than on Thanksgiving!

One image I did spend a lot of time on afterward was a shot of my 3-year-old grandson Jakob, who I had noticed positioned in front of bright sunshine, streaming in from a dining room window, as he examined one of his Christmas presents. I knew I wouldn't have the time to set up a candid the way I really wanted, or to shoot many frames before Jakob would move on to other things. So I simply pushed down the pop-up and fired off an available-light frame in hopes I'd have something usable.

The color picture above is the original, unedited shot. I didn't feel strongly about it, but I did notice interesting spot illumination on Jakob's cheek, nose and forehead that I thought would be worth emphasizing in a grayscale (black-and-white) conversion. So in post-processing, I made a copy of the jpeg, converted it to grayscale, cropped it to eliminate the tiny stray light on the bottom left, fiddled with the facial shadows and highlights to play up the spot facial illumination, and tweaked the contrast. I left in the two tiny lights in the right background of the image to retain some balance and a representation of the holiday. The lights were on a garland decorating a living room wall. The result of the edit is the black-and-white version you see above left.

Then I made a copy of that b/w image and recropped it as a tight horizontal in pursuit of a dramatic, moody feel (below). On the crop, only the bottom of the two background garland lights showed up, and at this tight of a crop, that tiny light became more prominent and, hence, a distraction. So I cloned (erased) it out. The tradeoff going from the vertical to horizontal crop was a considerable loss of size -- my guess is that this version will lose quality printed at anything larger than 5x7 -- but I do like the effect, and all in all, the two-grayscale copies gave me value out of an image I might otherwise have discarded.

Gary Fong, by the why, markets a variety of flash diffusers; most are for electronic flash units; the Puffer I mentioned above is for pop-ups and is among the least expensive. You can check out his full line at http://store.garyfonginc.com/ ... and no, I don't know Gary! I'm simply providing this in case anyone would like to explore it further.