Due to heavy business traveling over the past month, I am a bit behind on the blog posts. For this post, I will take advantage of a trip I made to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to visit family and to have a little fun along the way. Using frequent flier mileage took the sting out of that expense.
October is a wonderful time of year to travel most anywhere, as the kiddies are back in school, their parents back to work, and the weather is usually pleasant. The South can have blistering hot and humid weather, not to mention monsoon rains, but on this trip it was mostly in the 70s-80s with just a few days of light rain.
The first night we stayed at a motel on I-95 just outside of Savannah. It made for a long day, having to get up at 3am that day for a 6am flight connecting through Denver with a 2+ hour layover connecting on to Jacksonville, FL. The frequent flier seats are very limited and the flights available were not the best, but you get what you pay for. Between the flights and driving for several hours, I wanted to get out and shoot at twilight, where I took this shot.
The four parking lot lights criss-crossed over the two bikes and poles, making for some interesting shadows.
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We stayed with my my wife’s cousin, Jimmy in Spartanburg, SC, a quiet, sedate little berg, made famous as the corporate headquarters of Extended Stay America Motels and Denny’s Restaurants (who occupy the tallest skyscraper in town.) Also, all the BMW SUVs sold in the world are made in Spartanburg.
Jimmy’s house was decorated to the nines with Halloween decorations. I especially liked this row of illuminated skulls, photographed best at twilight.
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We drove on to Savannah, GA, a beautiful, historic city that really represents the best of the South to me. We stayed at the River Street Hotel, with a room overlooking the Savannah River. That put us in the middle of town, with walking access to great restaurants, bars and museums. The 4 foot square balcony gave me just enough room to set up a tripod to do a time-lapse sequence. The following is about 500 individual images over a two and a half hour time frame (5AM to 730am) showing night through sunrise. Watch for all the containership traffic. I also did a sunset version, but the sky was more interesting in this dawn version, there was more ship traffic and I like all the early morning delivery trucks, too.
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While waiting for a table for dinner that night, I did this shot from the bar with my mini tripod.
The walls are, indeed pink, as this place is the famous Olde Pink House restaurant. The light is from a multi-faceted light fixture. The food was fabulous and a reservation is highly suggested for next time.
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While Lee waited for a table (a 45 minute wait, with no reservation), I wanted to take advantage of twilight and the balmy weather, so I explored within a block of the restaurant and shot these images over just a few minutes, during my favorite twilight-time.
This was shot with the camera propped up on a stone wall. I love the interesting mix of colors in this shot. Note the Pink House Restaurant on the left.
These are simply down-spouts, but over the top in design.
Here a chained bicycle is lit by the overly bright light over the ATM machine, which I purposely blocked with the “no parking” sign.
Right behind the restaurant is a church, where I wandered up the steps to make this shot, leaning against a railing. I like the mix of warm tones and cool tones from the sky.
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While in Savannah, we found out that there was a show at the Telfair Museum with 4×5 large format urban night shots. Being another photographer who appreciates working at night with the big camera, that was a must-see for me. The photographer is John Dowell who is a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and the show was called “Harmonic Discord”. I took a couple of clandestine photos in the galleries, but this link will show a couple of cleaner examples, with a bio on him, too. The work seemed to have a sameness to them and I liked the abstractions better than the large amount of simple, wide night shots of skyscrapers in eastern US cities.
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On our last night in Savannah, I wandered around the hotel and shot some of the old historic buildings along Bay Street.
The buildings along Bay Street and River Street are multi-layered and they have different types of lighting which added to the look and texture that caught my eye.
As you can see from this image, the lower portions are for deliveries and trash pick-up and are lit with cold industrial mercury vapor lamps. It appears in this image that the famous red Cotton Exchange Building from the 1880s appears to be a facade with no real footing–but it’s not. Today it’s a restaurant/tavern.
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We drove on to St. Augustine, FL and spent one night to break the long drive and to explore that city’s historic architecture. While wandering around the Castillo de San Marcos (or as the locals say, ‘The Fort’), I shot these young teens paddle boarding in Halloween costumes in the inland waterway.
I panned the camera during this half second exposure. When I yelled to them they said they were off to a party. It was Friday night, after all!
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This is not something I usually do, but here is a self portrait against the fort ramparts. There was a bright floodlight that threw the shadow. I had to do several to get the perspective right and to get one sharp enough for the 1/4 second exposure. It looks acceptable at this size.
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We drove on across Florida visiting junk shops and taking many photos of nearly abandoned, closed down towns. The economy has really hit some of the smaller, out of the way towns very hard. Since they are shot during the day, I won’t share them here.
We drove on and visited my dad and his wife in central FL. On the afternoon we arrived, there was an antique car show in town, so I took advantage to take a few shots. The sunset and coloring was so intensely magenta-orange, quite different than sunsets here in Southern California. I did this shot of a rare 1942 Studebaker, as I liked the mixture of the intense green and subtleties of the warm twilight sky.
It was a whirlwind trip, indeed.