Putting down the camera at Myrtle Beach ...except for a couple sunsets

From Savannah, Lee Ann and I drove up to Myrtle Beach to meet some of her family to enjoy the beach and some rest and relaxation.

We had mostly decent weather; there was a day or two when it was on the chilly side, and one evening we spent an hour or so monitoring a local television channel to ascertain when vicious storms headed our way could turn out to be serious enough to seek protection from tornadoes. 

But the storms moved out before turning that dangerous. 

Almost all the pictures I took while in Myrtle Beach this time were with my iPhone, and they were family photos. Nothing I am going to bother with in blog posts. 

The exception are images you see in this post. Usually I go to Myrtle Beach expecting interesting sunrise pictures. Lee Ann coaxed me to find something interesting with the sunsets while I was there, so that's what the images in this post are about, all taken from the balcony of our rooms. Yes, I use the plural rooms; for the first two nights, we stayed on the second floor at one end of the hotel; we went up four floors and to the other side of the building for the remainder of our stay. 

Leading off the post is a photo looking southeast and was taken from the balcony on the higher-floor room. The sun is lowering behind us, so you see rich, late-afternoon dramatic colors and contrast here. I'll let the captions tell the story of the remaining images in the post. There is some interesting "looks," given the direction and time involved.

Above: This image was taken from the first room's balcony, which looks due east and was right after sundown.

The photo and above and the last two below were taken on a different night, about 15 minutes before the sun went down. They also were from the balcony of the sixth-floor room. The first one above also looks east, and you appreciate that dramatic late-afternoon lighting on the orange building facade. For the bottom two images, I turned to look toward the sun. The first below, a perspective shot, finds the sun curling around the left backside of the building, casting out what I thought was some cool flare rays. I then put my polarizing filter on the Tamron 28-300 f.3.5-6.3 lens (on my Canon 6D) and zoomed in to get the final image, a much clearer depiction of how the sun was dropping behind the building.  

Dissection of an image

The above image was the starting point of an odyssey that I'm sure a lot of photographers have experienced: Finding different ways to look at the same image. The "anatomy of a single image" below tells the story of one such odyssey -- some successes, one surprise and one "I'm not sure sure about this."

The top image isn't anything spectacular or unusual. It was taken inside the Garfield Park Conservatory in Indianapolis in a tropical plants exhibit. The foliage was dangling from a boulder from which a very modest waterfall was spilling. I got behind the waterfall and shot into the light behind it. Dodging the light was nearly unavoidable; the conservatory is a glass-surrounded facility, so no matter what angle I chose to shoot -- unless it were straight on -- I would have had to take into consideration the presence of backlight -- and decide whether I wanted to compensate for it by overexposing, or shooting for silhouette. I chose to overexpose slightly because that day, I wasn't interested in a silhouette; I wanted to capture the color in the foliage and the waterdrop cascade. I wasn't surprised afterward when I saw a lot of the reflective circles -- the result of flare. But I chose to use those to my advantage in this little project.

Again, the shot at the very top is the original image. Right below it is the same frame with a slight increase in the color saturation and contrast. Not a huge difference, but enough to bring out a little more red in the leaf and darken the dark green foliage shadow on the left. Next, I took the same frame one more time, boosted the highlights and increased the saturation (only a little less than the first time). The result is the image above. The red leaves, especially, are beginning to pop out in the frame, which was the objective in the first place. It's fascinating what just a tweak in highlights and saturation can do when you're looking to distinguish elements in an image file.

While studying those three images, it occurred to me that I could crop this frame into smaller segments and create several whole "new" pictures. First, I concentrated on isolating -- and accentuating -- the vertical nature of the leaf foliage itself. So I created a copy of the original image and cropped it to isolate just the leaf vine.

Again I went back to the saturation, highlights and contrast and tweaked with those ever so slightly to effect the vertical version at left. The one thing I didn't like was how the crop drew unwanted attention on the bright white spot in the upper right corner. I figured that if I really wanted to display this version, I could address the white splotch by applying a frame or border to the image, harnessing a bit of the white. Two things I did like about this version:

1) It gave more prominence to the hefty water cluster near the bottom of the red-leafed vine, the heart of the cluster falling right on top of the series of horizontal reflective circles.

2) It played up two solo reflective circles -- one just above the third leaf down, the other on the far left side of the frame, providing a sort of balance.

Next, I wanted to create an extremely horizontal frame. At the far left side of the rectangle, I placed the lower portion of the leaf cluster; on the far right, the green foliage with the white circular spot. So I created that crop off the original, went to the color curves and played up the reds ever so slightly and the greens a bit more and came up with the horizontal slice you see at left. I liked that it maintained the prominence of the water cluster; what I didn't like was that it possibly introduced confusion as the real subject, or focus, of the image -- was it the leafed vine, or the foliage on the right? My initial hope was to include the two for balance, and again initially, I thought that because the leafed vine would be in focus and the green foliage out of focus (beyond the depth of field), that it would be clear that the leafed vine was the focal point. But after making the crop, I wasn't so sure that got accomplished.

I saved the most enjoyable sectioning for last. It was the super-crop of just the horizontal row of reflective circles on the far left of the original image (the one dissected by the unleafed vine).

With only a few droplets in the image anywhere close to being in focus, it left me a challenge to find something to make this version appealing. So I pushed the color curves to the extreme -- and came upon this strikingly dual-shade purple abstract. It did fetch a few comments at my photo.net gallery (in the Manipulations folder). The only drawback to this crop was that the image file is so small -- relative to the original, anyway -- that I probably couldn't squeeze a print larger than 5x7 out of it, and that might be stretching it.