A long, strange, frustrating trip that lasted 3 years …

Almost two years ago, beginning on Aug. 1, 2023, a multipart series spotlighting small-high school and small-college football in Indiana ran in this space. It was a significant departure from what this blog usually presented over the years, which has been a chronicling of my various photographic shoots and pursuits. 

To put the “significant departure” succinctly, the multi-part, multi-post series On Hoosier Gridirons was about storytelling through the traditional journalistic process of reporting, writing and mostly the use of words, instead of the art of photography ordinarily used in Photo Potpourri.

In the course of my months of research and interviews leading up to the publication of stories in that series, I stumbled upon by pure happenstance (or dumb luck, if you will) what struck me then (and continues today) to be a significant misdeed — albeit unintentional — dealt to a legendary small-college football coach, the late Stewart “Red” Faught (pictured at left). Faught coached football teams at Franklin (Ind.) College from 1957 to 1988 — 32 years.

What made the misdeed so frustrating to me was the “perfect storm” that led to it in the first place. It was the unfortunate result of a statewide institution — the Indiana Football Hall of Fame — that did not abide the trust it had been accorded by members of the news media, who then compounded the misdeed by neglecting their professional duty to double-check facts.

In summer 2018, news media reports started circulating stories about how Franklin College’s then-head football coach, Mike Leonard, was close to equaling and passing Red Faught’s school record for total wins as football coach, and that Leonard would likely pass Faught’s total sometime that season. The stories cited Faught’s total career wins as 120, and once the first story broke citing that number, other print and broadcast media picked up the story and repeated the 120 wins total as fact. 

The problem was ... 120 was not Faught’s final wins total. I worked in the newspaper business for 37+ years, and while going to journalism classes in college, nothing was more ingrained in us students than the importance of accuracy and how double-checking facts was a critical step in ensuring accuracy.

Through most of my years in the business, the majority of which (33+) were spent in the newsroom of The Indianapolis Star, we had a decent-sized staff that included several layers of editing, fact-checking and back-stopping in its news production. That isn’t the case today. 

In 2025, newsrooms across the globe — if they are still in operation (and many smaller dailies have been bought out and/or folded) — have slashed staff and now rely on a razor-thin number of people to crank out much thinner newspapers in favor of “online content.” There aren’t multiple layers of editing anymore.

Back to my perfect storm case ... I came upon the Faught career wins snafu in mid-2022 while working on the On Hoosier Gridirons small-high school and small-college football series project. I needed to get my hands on a precise number of career coaching wins, losses and ties for Faught in his time as head coach at Franklin College. I went first to his Wikipedia entry, hoping to find that information there. When Wikipedia said his record was 155 wins, 146 losses and 6 ties, my eyes bugged out. 

I immediately remembered that Mike Leonard had left the school in 2019 with a wins total in the 120s (it turned out to be 129). I also remembered the media coverage of Leonard’s alleged passing of Faught’s wins total the previous year. I knew something was amiss. I hunted around for whatever more authoritative documentation I could find on Faught’s final record at Franklin College.

One of the next documents I encountered in my search was a Faught biography at the Indiana Digital Library, which states that Faught finished his time at Franklin with a record of 160-139-6. I now had a third different Franklin College wins number for the coach.

I started searching on newspapers.com and came across those newspaper stories by The Indianapolis Star and Johnson County (Ind.) Daily Journal quoting the 120 wins number leading up to Leonard’s 2018 season as head coach, so I figured I would have to find out where they got that number from. 

It didn’t take me long. A Google search came next, and I found the 120 number cited in the Faught member biography page of the Indiana Football Hall of Fame website, where at the time it said Faught’s career coaching record was 120-99-4. 

I resumed my Google search and could find no other “authoritative” resource using the same record as displayed by the Indiana Football Hall of Fame. So I was pretty sure where the progenitors of the 2018 Mike Leonard publicity got their “data” from. My eventual research would determine that the IFHOF was wrong on all three counts for Faught — wins, losses and ties. And it was significantly wrong. The Wikipedia entry was in error, too, but at least it came much closer to the truth than the IFHOF.

I returned to newspaper.com and dug back to late 1988, when Faught was ending his Franklin coaching career. I began to collect and copy stories repeating the 160-139-6 number I had seen at the Indiana Digital Library. At that point, I decided to contact Ryan Thomas, an assistant athletic director at Franklin College who at the time also was serving as sports information director. I asked him if he knew that the school had a significant accuracy problem on its hands regarding Red Faught’s coaching record. 

I told Thomas of my findings regarding the conflicting numbers for Faught’s coaching record, and while he politely thanked me, he said the college had no authoritative record available to verify Faught’s official final coaching record and that until it had more authoritative information, it would continue to recognize Mike Leonard as the all-time wins leader. 

He explained that all of the school’s official athletic teams’ records and data vanished upon the death of longtime sports information director Kevin Elixman in July 2015. No archival records could be found in Elixman's office nor, apparently, on his office computer for any and all sports at the school, he said. Elixman had held the SID job for 25 years. 

One of the tasks Thomas told me he faced was to somehow re-create as much of those missing records as he could, although he was at a loss as to exactly how he was going to be able to do it or when he would hopefully finish. 

Sympathizing with his plight, I told him I would spend a few hours at newspapers.com going back to 1957 and hopefully piece together a chart from scratch, logging each of Faught’s wins, losses and ties in every season to ascertain his full record. I told Thomas I would let him know my findings.

It took me quite a few hours over one day and part of the next to assemble the chart, and when I finished, I came up with a final record of 159-140-6. Yes, it bothered me at the time that my wins and losses numbers were one off from the prevailing data I was encountering in my research (160-139), but I had nothing to explain it except that either those people had miscounted or somehow the outcome of one game in all those seasons had been reversed. (The latter would prove to be prophetic, but more on that later.)

I reported these finding to Thomas and sent him a copy of my hard-copy tallies as well as a PDF/Word document onto which I had composed a more readable year-by-year chart. On the far right side of the chart, I included the name of the source publication I used, the publication date and the page number from which I derived my information for each game over those 32 seasons.

For the record, the former Franklin Evening Star was my source for almost all of the results through 1963; the Johnson County Daily Journal was the source for almost all the results thereafter, through 1988.   

I also sent Thomas copies of the newspaper clippings I collected in my research citing the 160 wins total (including the Daily Journal’s front-page obituary for Faught in September 2005. That 2005 obituary included a sidebar with the 160-139-6 record.)

Another of those clippings, a Nov. 11, 1988, column by notable Indianapolis News Sports Editor Wayne Fuson, contained a sidebar season-by-season chart very similar to the one I had just compiled from scratch. Fuson’s chart also tallied 160-139-6. His chart and mine agree in every season except 1961, when his chart states that the team won 4 and lost 5; my findings were that the Grizzlies won only 3 games that year and lost 6. 

Because of how troubled I was about that conflict with the 1961 season, I even went back to the Evening Star archives for 1961 and double-checked my data. I again came up with a 3-6 season record. (More on this later.)

About two weeks later, I wrote again to Thomas asking how my documentation was received by the athletics department, and he said the department appreciated my work and was prepared to acknowledge that Faught was still the all-time wins leader. As best as I know, the school made no public admission of such, however. 

I decided it was time to talk to someone at the Indiana Football Hall of Fame to see if they could enlighten me as to how there was such a significant discrepancy with its data on Faught. I reached out to Matt Fisher, who at the time — this was still mid-2022 — was listed as a member of the IFHOF Board of Trustees. He also was a science teacher at Richmond High School. (He no longer appears to be on the board.)

Fisher returned my call, and when I explained to him why I had contacted him, he didn’t take long to surmise that the 120-99-4 record at Faught’s IFHOF member biographical page probably was the coach’s record at the time Faught was inducted into the Hall which was June 27, 1981. (Faught would coach for seven more seasons, amassing 40 more wins, 40 more losses and two more ties before calling it a career at Franklin.)

Fisher further surmised that Faught’s coaching record did not get updated when the Hall went to carry over the coach’s biographical info onto his member web page when the IFHOF went online. Fisher explained that the Hall is thin-staffed and doesn’t have the manpower to stay on top of such things as updating member biographical information. In most cases, it’s not an issue because most inductees usually don’t enter the Hall until their careers are over. But there have been exceptions, and Faught was one of those.

I got the full June 27, 1981, induction date initially from the IFHOF, which had that information on its bio page for Faught at the time I talked to Fisher. I also confirmed it from newspaper clippings. I made a screen grab photo of Faught’s complete IFHOF bio page to have on hand for comparison if any changes were later made.

Fisher divulged one other shocking (at least to me) bit of information during our conversation. He said the IFHOF had closed and sold its physical building in Richmond during the COVID pandemic and that it was now operating as an online-only entity.  

Not long after I talked to Fisher, I sent him a copy of the same news clipping documentation and the Word/PDF chart showing Faught’s real year-by-year record while at Franklin College that I had sent to Ryan Thomas. (Note: A few weeks later, someone did get into Faught’s IFHOF biographical page and removed the date of Faught’s induction ??? ... but left the bad coaching record numbers intact!)

Unfortunately, the IFHOF member biographies snafu doesn’t stop with Red Faught. The On Hoosier Gridirons project I was working on involved two other Indiana Football Hall of Fame coach inductees who were still active at the time, Bud Wright of Sheridan and Mike Gillin, then coaching at Mooresville. Wright was inducted in 2002 and Gillin in 2014. I checked their wins, losses and ties in their IFHOF biographies, and sure enough, their numbers were outdated, too. 

Interestingly, someone did go back into Wright's bio sometime after 2011 and note that he became Indiana's all-time winningest football coach that year with Sheridan’s victory that season over Lapel High School. Wright finished at Sheridan in 2024 with a career record of 463-219. In Gillin’s case, his IFHOF bio — as of Dec. 14, 2025 — had him still coaching at Indian Creek High School, which he had left in 2014. He took over the head coaching job at Mooresville High School in 2017 and stepped down after the 2025 season with a career record of 373-157. His high school coaching career wins total is good for third best in Indiana.

After going through all this, I was left with a bothersome dilemma. How would I handle these findings in the On Hoosier Gridirons series? I rationalized that because Faught was a very small part of the package, and given that Leonard had stepped down as head coach in 2019 and was no longer in position to break Faught’s wins record, I should relegate what I had learned to a mere footnote. And so that’s what I did; it is the first footnote in Chapter 5. It’s a very long footnote, but again, it’s just a footnote.

But that all changed in early December 2024, when Franklin College announced that Mike Leonard would return to the school and coach the football team again, beginning with the 2025 season. Of course, local news media reported the news that Leonard was returning to coach, still describing Leonard as the winningest football coach in Franklin College history … because no public correction had been made even though the college had been aware of the error for two and a half years.

I wrote by email to the reporter who wrote that breaking news story for The Indianapolis Star and told him about my findings. I also sent him authoritative documentation similar to what I had sent Ryan Thomas and Matt Fisher. He kindly acknowledged my alert and thanked me. He said he’d spread the word to the rest of The Star sports staff. 

When I told him that when I was still at the newspaper, we would have published a correction — even if it involved fixing an error four years after the fact. That way, our library would be able to attach the correction and a warning to archived stories containing the error so that reporters and editors coming across erroneous clippings while doing research in the future would be alerted to the errors and not repeat them. 

The reporter responded as I had expected. He said staff reductions at the state’s largest newspaper had even reached the valued librarians and that there was no longer a library staff to do such things.

I also relayed the same information and documentation by email to the reporter who wrote the story about Leonard’s return for the Johnson County Daily Journal. I received no acknowledgment or response. So I wrote to that reporter’s sports editor, Ryan O’Leary, who did acknowledge and thanked me. He also said that Franklin College’s Ryan Thomas had contacted him after seeing the reporter’s story mentioning Leonard as the school’s winningest coach. O’Leary said Thomas passed along the news that Faught was still the top dog.

O’Leary was kind enough to share with me the identity of the individual who started the media stir in 2018, and in deference to his act of kindness (that mystery — about who started it all — had bothered me since I first came across the problem in 2022), I’m not going to embarrass that individual publicly by divulging the name here. 

O’Leary did tell me he felt that his paper should do something to publicly acknowledge the original faux pas, agreeing that readers deserve to understand what is going on now that Leonard was returning. He said he would address it in a column that weekend. I no longer live in Indiana, so I didn’t know if he followed through on that promise. I hunted around for it but had no luck.

Two weeks later, I still couldn’t find any evidence online that the Daily Journal had addressed the issue, so I wrote again to O’Leary to inquire if he’d mentioned the snafu in a column, and if so, when. 

His response: “I did not. Leaving it alone for the moment at the request of Ryan Thomas. I revised all our most recent online stories and will make sure all future references are correct. At some point I’ll find a proper way to address it without humiliating anyone.”

A couple weeks later, I made one more attempt to nudge the IFHOF to recognize — and fix — the problem its outdated member biographies pose for website visitors and for researchers. At the IFHOF website, I found a “contact” option I did not remember coming across when I first sought out someone with the IFHOF to discuss the data snafu in 2022. 

This contact option allows a visitor to send a message to someone (there’s no indication who will get it) by filling out a form and submitting it. So I filled out the form, explained my business and waited. Within a few days, I received the following:

“Hi Joe. Thank you for your email. The IFCA (Indiana Football Coaches Association) took over the Indiana Football Hall of Fame in 2021, when Richmond closed its doors due to financial hardship. All bios on the website before 2021 were initiated from Richmond. I can only speak on the bios since then. When a person is inducted into the Hall of Fame, we send a “bio template” to the nominee and ask him to fill it out. The information is provided by the Hall of Famer. We ask them not to include the “ages” of children or grandchildren and the numbers of “wins/losses” if they are still current, as (that information) is impossible to (keep current). We also give them the opportunity to update their information by emailing me directly. Obviously, in the case of Coach Faught, it has never been updated.

“We are currently working with our website company to investigate the possibility of using AI (artificial intelligence) to keep track of wins and losses, championships, etc. We have over 900 inducted into the hall, and we try our best to stay “up to date.”

The response was signed by Scott Bovenkerk, who identified himself as the coordinator of the IFCA-Hall of Fame. This was the first I’d learned that the coaches association had taken over responsibility for the IFHOF. Matt Fisher had not mentioned that to me in 2022.

Several weeks later, after again checking Faught’s page at the IFHOF, I noticed someone had changed the coach’s career record — but used the erroneous data from the coach’s aforementioned Wikipedia entry. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the product of using AI to which Bovenkerk had alluded. I sent an email alert to Bovenkerk telling him that Faught’s Wikipedia data was not accurate. I received no acknowledgement of receipt or any other response.

Then in late June 2025, I heard from O’Leary, who now was the soon-to-be former sports editor of the Daily Journal, letting me know he had been hired to replace Ryan Thomas at Franklin College (Thomas had recently left to take a non-sports public relations/communications position in Indianapolis). O’Leary said he would begin his new job the following Monday but that he was in his new office trying to set up. He said he’d found a stack of documents there in which there was a sheet of paper containing a chart very similar to the one I had compiled from scratch.

Faught’s career record at Franklin after adding up all the numbers on the chart he found was 160-139-6. He took a picture of the chart and sent it to me so I could compare it to my chart. Again we agreed in every season except that one in 1961 that also differed from Wayne Fuson’s 1988 chart.

I reminded O’Leary that my chart had concluded with a final record of 159-140-6, and without hesitation, he said the document he came across also contained an apparent explanation for the 1961 discrepancy in numbers: While Taylor University had handily defeated the Grizzlies on the field that season, at some point afterward, it was determined that Taylor had used an ineligible player in the game, so Taylor was assessed a loss by forfeit ex-post facto. 

That information was not in the game story when I came across it in the archives while doing my research, so there was nothing to send me hunting for more information to learn about the forfeit. So my chart’s final career coaching record for Faught has since been modified to agree with O’Leary’s, Fuson’s and the Indiana Digital Library: 160-139-6.

Before ending our conversation, I asked O’Leary if he would try to figure out a way to publicly explain/correct the 2018 snafu, given how Mike Leonard would be adding to his career totals when the 2025 season began, and he said he would, adding that he would do it in a way that avoided embarrassment to anyone. I also told him I thought the IFHOF would be more inclined to make a change to get Faught’s bio coaching record accurate if it heard about the error and correct numbers from someone at the college like O’Leary.

For the record, the next day I wrote once more to Bovenkerk at the IFHOF to tell him that O’Leary and I had conversed and reached agreement on the 160-139-6 numbers for Faught’s career record at Franklin. I told him he was welcome to contact O’Leary and verify, now that O’Leary was an official employee of the college’s athletics department. I also told Bovenkerk when O’Leary would start his new job at Franklin (June 30). I have yet to hear back from Bovenkerk, although at this point, I don’t expect to. As of July 3, 2025, the IFHOF bio for Faught was still using the erroneous numbers from Faught’s Wikipedia entry.

Note added Aug. 26, 2025: I checked Faught’s IFHOF member bio page this morning, and the correct career record is now there.

I will say that until now, I had felt like a lone voice in the wilderness about this whole thing, especially considering that I had no media platform of importance to right this wrong. It has been extremely frustrating. 

I’ll wrap this up with an admonition: If you are a member of the news media who is reading this, please be aware of the flawed data in the IFHOF member biographies, at least those members who were inducted before the end of their careers. Consider yourselves warned!

A pictorial toast to street performers

There's a funny story (OK, perhaps only slightly funny) to the genesis of today's post. I'll try to make it brief. 

While working at my online site at SmugMug.com, I was organizing a gallery involving street performers I'd photographed in the past. It had not occurred to me until doing this work on the gallery that I photographed a flute player in Savannah twice -- and four years apart. And each time, he was performing on the riverwalk along River Street. 

The first time was on Feb. 1, 2018 (see photo leading off the post). He was wearing a red, black, gray and white checkered long-sleeve shirt, light blue jeans and a small fedora with a feather on top. I'm sure I came across him while doing a walk-around the riverwalk area that day.

The next time was on March 30, 2022 (see photo above), and I spied him not far from where the Savannah River cruise ship, The Georgia Queen, was docking after Lee Ann and I had been on a leisurely trip along the river close to where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. We were still on the cruiser when I took this photo. This time, the musician was wearing a white shirt, gray pants and a ship captain's hat. 

Interestingly, each time I photographed him, I happened to catch him looking my way at least once in my pictures. (see first two photos below). Nevertheless, it did not occur to me in 2022 that I had seen this guy on the 2018 visit. That lightning bolt struck Tuesday of this week as I was organizing the aforementioned street performers photo gallery, a link to which you'll find in this sentence. 

I figured that while relating this story, I'd go ahead an offer some more photos from the street performances gallery here. So below are some other shots. Most, I might add, were taken in Savannah, where there are quite a few such performers at various spots along the riverwalk. 

The fellow above and below I remember only by his first name, Mike, even though he told me his full name at the time I took these photos in October 2011. I even did a post about him ... in 2013, two years after the fact! I encountered him while doing a photo shoot along Mass Ave in Indianapolis. As the 2013 post mentions, Mike told me at the time he was leaving for Europe the next day. I've always wondered what became of him ... 

   

We're back in Savannah for the next few performers. I did not catch any of their names, unfortunately. But the guys in the photo above, below and second and third photos below all were stationed at some point along the riverwalk. I came upon the guy above on March 7, 2017, which coincided with my first-ever visit to Savannah. The next two performers, very animated in their a cappella delivery, were photographed Feb. 1, 2018, the same day I first photographed the flute player in the lead-off photo. 

The horn player above and below I came across in Savannah's Forsyth Square, the largest (by far) of the city’s almost two dozen neighborhood one-block parks, or squares. The photo date was Dec. 14, 2017. On that same date, in one of the smaller neighborhood squares, I came across a saxophone player dressed as Santa entertaining a young boy and his mother (second and third photos below). 

Above: This performer I came across in Savannah on the far western end of the riverwalk on April 1, 2022. 

Above and below: We briefly leave music in order to transition to painting with this guy, who is bundled up on a cold autumn day, Nov. 16, 2018, to be exact. He was demonstrating his craft in one of one-block neighborhood squares in Savannah. The bottom photo is a cropped version of the one above.

Above and below: Still in Savannah for these shots, again in Forsyth Square, but on March 29, 2022. 

Above and below: The last performer in this post was another sax player, this time on the pier at Waterfront Park in Charleston, S.C. I came across him on March 10, 2017. We stopped in Charleston after leaving Savannah that month before returning to North Carolina.  

A salute to Hershel Saylor, the photo club colleague with the 3D camera

In the early part of the 2010s, I was an active member of two photography clubs in Indianapolis. On Saturday, while perusing some pictures of mine from that era, I happened to think of a particular fellow who was a member of one of the clubs, the Indy Meetup Photo Club. So I went online to see if I could find a way to contact him just to see how he was doing.

In my search for that one piece of information, I was saddened to learn something entirely different about Hershel Saylor: He had passed away in 2020, almost five years to the day. 

Hershel was someone from the club who stuck with me through the years because of a photographic innovation of his — and I think he told me he concocted it himself — which was to shoot three dimensional photos. The tool, or camera, he used to do this was actually two cameras connected side by side. Every composition he made appeared on each camera’s LCD screen, side by side (see photo leading off the post).  

I don't recall studying his results back then to know or appreciate whether the 3D objective really worked or succeeded, but I remember him trying to explain to me how it was supposed to work, and how that explanation went over my head. 

Hershel was a tech geek of sorts, so I guess his tech-speak didn’t land anywhere close to the comprehension center of my brain. It probably wasn’t his fault; it was just the feeble nature of my ability to absorb geek talk in an understanding way. 

In 2015, a year or so after I had left the clubs, I dropped Hershel an email when I saw a couple of athletes with the surname Saylor at Indianapolis Roncalli High School being mentioned a lot in the sports section of the local newspaper. I asked him if he was related to either of them by chance. 

After kindly mentioning how it was good to hear from me and that he and his wife, Deb, who also was a member of the IMUPC, have spoken of me “quite a few times since the camera club,” he confirmed that the two Saylor athletes I had been reading about were children of a nephew of his. 

He then told me that he’d been doing some work for WHMB TV (Channel 40 in Indianapolis) for the station’s Friday sports broadcast. 

I found his obituary online and enjoyed a wonderful pictorial tribute that his family had arranged to display on the page. It included a few photos of Hershel holding his 3D camera, two more of which I'll provide immediately below. All three photos are from the pictorial tribute, incidentally.

After viewing the tribute, I went into my photo archives to see if I had any photos of Hershel from our days together in the photo club, and it turns out, I did. I’ll present them below, although none of them shows him using his special camera. 

It occurred to me while composing this post that the club never devoted a meeting (at least none that I had attended) for Hershel to introduce and demonstrate his 3D camera operation. It certainly would have been worth considering doing so, given that the club welcomed all topics related to the craft for its meetings.

Above, Hershel and fellow IMUPC member Bill Riggs peruse some of the images our club was putting up for sale at the 2011 rendition of the annual Christmas Market hosted by the Joy of All Who Sorrow Church at 16th and Delaware streets in Indianapolis. The photo below was taken at another point that evening at the Market. 

Six days after that event, the IMUPC had its annual club Christmas get-together, which is when I took photo above. The same month as the above Christmas Market and our club Christmas get-together, club members had a night outing in Zionsville to shoot holiday decorations, and that's where I shot the first photo below.

On June 16, 2012, Hershel and wife Deb joined club members in relaxing and enjoying refreshments after a full day of shooting the second then-annual Hendricks County Park2Park running race in which teams of six took turns running splits of a 60+ mile course starting at a county park at one end of the county and finishing in a county park at the other end. Below, in another photo from the obituary page photo tribute, Hershel enjoys the camaraderie of a fellow club member, Fred (his surname escapes me now), during the Park2Park shoot. 

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 II: 3 other shops at Barefoot Landing

While we were at Barefoot Landing at the Waterfront in North Myrtle Beach, we spent a chunk of time in two stores, Christmas Mouse and Toy Kingdom, and I darted into a third shop quickly to get photos to verify the Purpleologist shop’s boast of being a “Lover of All Things Purple.”

I’ll start with Christmas Mouse, an all-things Christmas shop that I’d mentioned in my 2021 post on Barefoot Landing at the Waterfront, so I won’t devote a lot of pictures in this post about it other than the photo leading off the post, the two that conclude this store’s section of the post ... and a series of photos showing a curious “find” for those in our family who happen to be fans of the late Bob Ross, the painter who hosted the PBS television show The Joy of Painting from 1983-94.

Our “finds” were a figurine (first photo below) and various Christmas ornaments featuring Ross, which appear in photos below the figurine. 

One of the two other non-Bob Ross photos I took this trip at Christmas Mouse that I’ll feature here is interesting yuletide tree decorated in all silver ornaments (first photo below). To the left of the tree, is a display of silver-colored decoration options, available to purchase, to use for doing the same thing with your tree at home ... or to use in any other manner the buyer chooses, of course. A photo of the full wall of those decorations appears below the one of the tree. Click on the images to bring up larger versions of these or any photos in the blog. 

Next up is the Toy Kingdom, which we decided to check out to entertain the toddlers in our group and possibly to come up with kids’ gift ideas for Christmas 2025. The last photo in this section, the one of the stuffed lion, actually sat outside the entrance and greeted visitors. 

Last but not least, is Purpleologist, Lover of All Things Purple. And my quick dart inside — which took no more than a minute — proved that the boast is true to its word. The entirety of my shoot there, all of four photos (one of which is the exterior), appears below. 

Coming tomorrow, Myrtle Beach, Part III: June 7 sunrise