A Yates Mill Pond first for me: ice on the pond and minor patches of it on the trail

When I stopped at Yates Mill Pond Park yesterday for my daily walk, I had no intention of taking pictures because I’d done plenty of picture-making on other recent visits. But ... when you see something you hadn’t seen before, which happened Friday, it was hard not to pull out the iPhone camera and start snapping away.

The primary thing I hadn’t seen at the park before was ice on the pond, and there’s a bit of it in the lead-off photo. That murky, sheened section close to the shore was the only ice in this photo, which is the much larger section of pond on one side (south) of the main pedestrian bridge. 

I selected this photo to lead things off because of what I considered to be much more compelling compositional elements — silhouettes, reflections and cloud patterns — than the ice.

Ice on water was more prevalent elsewhere in the park, as shown in the series of photos immediately below this point. The first seven images below were taken on the smaller (north) side of the pond near the primary wooden pedestrian bridge. The remaining ice-on-water pictures were streams found on the early portion of the walking trail between the first and second pedestrian bridges.   

There were minor patches of snow (some mixed with ice) on the 2-mile trail itself. This was stuff that wasn’t able to melt from the recent warmer temperatures because of how tree branches sufficiently blocked the sun from the ground. 

But there wasn’t enough of the snow/ice to thwart walkers. I covered the full trail yesterday, and there was always a portion of path free of ice or snow that a pedestrian could land on to avoid the patches. I present a view images of that spotty white cover below. 

I returned to the park Saturday to walk, and many of the patches had disappeared or shrunk. But boy, the trade-off was a very gusty wind, dropping wind-chill temps to 20ish, making Saturday’s stroll the coldest-ever for me there. 

Fortunately, I’d checked the weather beforehand and added a layer of clothing, which turned out to be exactly what I needed. 

Much of the ice on the smaller (north) section of pond and on the streams near the second pedestrian bridge remained Saturday; almost all of it on the larger (south) section was gone. A curiosity Saturday: As I began my walk, there were scores of geese on the larger section of pond and a much smaller number — maybe a half-dozen — on the smaller section. They were all gone by the time I crossed the bridge on the return trip.

To see a larger, sharper version of a photo in this post, simply click on the image. To view a full gallery of images from the Friday shoot, follow the link in this sentence.

Sunset colors at Myrtle Beach

I’ve enjoyed far more sunrises than sunsets at Myrtle Beach, S.C., but the sunset I experienced there last week was very rewarding. Follow the sequential below as I try to describe things.

As I walked south at the start of the stroll, I watched as the sky colors transformed from a yellow orange (see first photo below) to increasingly more intense orange. A haze or mist also increased as I neared the end of a string of buildings along the beach, behind which the sun was starting to set.

The closer I got to that break in skyscrapers, the thicker the haze and more intense the orange.

Finally I saw the first burst of yellow, and I knew I’d see a sphere in a matter of seconds.

It was a spectacular show, but it wasn’t over yet. The golden sky was transcending to a large cluster of clouds in the northern sky ahead of me on the return trip, and the color in the clouds reflected onto the sheen of the tide lapping the shore in front of me. That’s what you see in the lead-off photo and the remaining pictures below, concluding with a shot of the a new cloud cluster hovering over a different set of buildings.

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 I: Sunrise

Lee Ann and I had some time to burn on our annual time-share deal, so we found accommodations at a resort in Myrtle Beach from Dec. 9-18. There was a catch to it, though; Lee Ann had some work to do on several of the days while we were there, so that gave me a good chunk of roam time to do something I hadn't been able to do a lot of in 2021 -- photograph!

I photographed seven churches, did an extensive photo documentation of a shopping development called Barefoot Landing at the Waterfront, profiled the local art museum (inside and outside), the ballpark of the Class A Myrtle Beach Pelicans minor league baseball team and a holiday market at a shopping development on the city's Southside called Market Common, which we had visited once before on a previous visit. 

We also spent a day in nearby Surfside Beach (a trip inspired by the holiday market visit, but more on that later), and I profiled a couple of shops we visited there. I also spent time profiling a portion of Ocean Boulevard, the closest north-south thoroughfare to the ocean in Myrtle Beach, spent a good amount of time photographing the sites along the beach (both with my DSLR and my iPhone 11) ... and we rose on time every morning to catch and photograph the sunrises. 

We've now visited Myrtle Beach more than a dozen times in the past five years or so, and I've seen and photographed a lot of sunrises there, enough so that I tell people that every sunrise seems to be different in some aspect. 

Which is why I start this 10-part series from our latest visit there with an overview of the sundry sunrises we experienced and photographs. Dense clouds precluded any photo-worthy sunrises on at least three mornings. But there was something noteworthy the rest of the days.

On Dec. 17, the last morning we chronicled sunrises, I used my Canon 6D and Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens almost exclusively. I grabbed four or so early pics with the iPhone first then turned to the 6D. 

On that last day, I also concentrated on integrating in my compositions an inordinately large number of birds that flew into the vista for what seemed like 15 minutes, at least. You see examples of these in the photo leading off the post and in the image immediately below. In the one at the top, I caught a bird just  before it crossed in front of the sun. I thought it'd be cool to catch the bird juxtaposed on the sun moments later, and I succeeded, too, but the light intensity was such (see photo below) that the bird's silhouette seems negligible.

The full array of sunrises from this trip can  be found in a folder at my galleries at SmugMug.com, although I plan to consolidate previous sunrises into this folder at a later date. But for now, the sunrises just from this week are there. 

On a few of the mornings, it was a matter of catching the sun in and around low-lying clouds ... or just before the cloud cover swallowed the orb for a couple hours before it rose high enough to stand clear of them.

On Dec. 10, the first morning I began recording sunrises, I had the beautiful colored cloud scheme above to enjoy before the sun ever made it above the lower cloud layer. If you look real close in the upper left area, you can catch a seagull in the image. When the sun did creep about that layer (below), it was visible only briefly, and then only in part because. 

I was more fortunate on Day 2, Dec. 11, although the pre-sunrise cloud and color scapes (above) did give me momentary pause. But the early sun stayed out in full long enough for me to capture the sun in full gloary (below) along with a fiery reflection on the ocean. 

Clouds were so dense on Day 3 (Dec. 12) that I skipped it altogether. But on Day 4, Dec. 13, I got the more intense coloring you see above captured the moment the sun first peeked above the thin horizon-layer of clouds. And then I got something I'd never had before -- a ghost copy of the sun (first and second below). I suspected flare was fully or partially responsible, after I went online afterward to explore this phenomenon, my suspicion was mostly supported. Flare is a sort of feedback of a light source when it reflects off another bright object. This can be controlled by removing a UV filter from the lens if you're using a DSLR. However, given that I was using my iPhone, I had no real control of it. So ... I decided to accept the oddity and keep these pictures. 

Day 5 (Dec. 14) gave me another set of cloud layers to contend with. I got the photo above, with a small portion of the orb obscured by clouds, just after it inched above the horizon. I couldn't wait to see what I'd get when the sun reached the thin cloud band above it in a few minutes. The result appears below and came with another ghost orb to the lower right of the sun ... along with a gorgeous reflection trail on the water and a seagull flying above and right of the sun. 

Day 6 (Dec. 15) brought me the above just-before-sunrise view, followed shortly afterward by the peeking above the cloud layer (first below) and, eventually, the full sun and bunch of birds in the foreground (second below). Clouds were prohibitive on Day 7 (Dec. 16), so there was no sunrise to be had. 

In general, documenting the sundry sunrises proved to be one of the most difficult posts I've composed in my 13 years maintaining this blog. The reason is hard to explain without dragging readers into tedium. One of the handy benefits of SmugMug.com, where I keep my online galleries, is that I can upload photos there directly from my iPhone, which I did for the majority of sunrises. But a quirk of iPhone pictures stored on SmugMug is that if/when a site owner goes to retrieve copies of them, they are sent to us in a zip file -- in duplicate. And until dealing with this particularly post -- halfway through the download process -- it was not apparent to me that the two copies of each image came in different sizes, and in most cases, significantly different.

After using the downloaded files for any blog posts, I archive them on my external hard drive. Which means ... all of the iPhone pictures I've archived all these years could very well have not been the most optimum quality of the duplicates I chose to keep. 

Next: Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum