C-R-A-S-H

I have so many pictures of this lighthouse in my portfolio but I

just added this one in the daylight so you can see what it actually

looks like. How about this shot? All comments and thoughts on this

shot or others in my portfolio are greatly appreciated!

Some dynamics in this photo looks fine. A splash.

Very good idea. Stones line leeds eye to lighthouse. But, you need to postprocess your photo to make it much better. Take care of horizont line, enhance contrast, add some sharpening, ...

 

Keep up the good work.

Wow--yeah, that looks quite a bit better. I guess I need to stop practicing taking pictures and start practicing editing them. Thanks for the good example to go by and helping me see what my compositions would look like if someone else had taken them.

Tyler, Good lines and composition, I appreciate the muted tones, that an ocean most times brings you, however, the above altered colored version is also quite astonishing... Keep up the great eye and nice work.. Glad to see some new pictures from you.. Cheers... Cole

:) Well Tyler, with film cameras, after taking photos, you have to go to photo lab, with digital, you have to use photo editing software :). Small hints ... load your photo in PhotoShop, press Ctrl-L and check levels on histogram. Make proper corrections. Then, select shadows/highlights option and make adjustments if neccessary. Maybe you should try brightness/contrast corrections also. Press Ctrl-U and play with colors. Finaly try unsharp mask filter. This basic tools will improve your photo within 2 minutes of your time. Hope this helps.

Just keep snapping, Tyler. This is a great shot. You can always further process the shots later on a rainy day, and if you are like me then you will not typically want to do very much to them.

 

I see from this picture that the light is still surrounded by water at high tide. Is that the bluffs on the eastern end of the Isle of Palms that I see in the distance, Sullivan's Island, or are you looking back toward Folly Island? Perhaps you have captured this from a perspective that I am not familiar with. There aren't that many more possibilities that I can imagine. I have not really spent a lot of time close to Morris Island light.

 

Sometimes the prettiest treatments are not the most accurate. That looks a lot like the light ought to look to me, with all of the sand and mud that has splashed or blown onto it after all these years. I am told that Morris Island used to be pretty large, but it was barely visible when I was a kid. I guess that being in the lee of the harbor jetties did that.

 

By the way, if that is "Folly River" to the right, then that is where my father spotted a shark back in the sixties (from the bridge behind Folly Island and James Island). I have never seen a shark, not in all my years in the surf or in kayaks, but lots of big fish have bumped my legs in the surf.

 

--Lannie

Lannie-Thanks again for the comments--I agree with everything you said! This shot was taken from the northern end of Folly--if you follow the road all the way to the end and then walk down the path to see the lighthouse (it used to be a road to some sort of armed forces base, which may be how you would remember it). Supposedly it was a base until Hugo hit and blew it apart and now I think it is actually a park of some sort (metal detectors are banned because some early parts of the civil war were fought there). I was looking into the distance to see if you could see Sullivan's Island Lighthouse--usually you can but perhaps it was just out of view (and, this was shot with my old Canon powershot so resolution and depth of field leaves a lot to be desired). Lastly, yes the lighthouse base is still under water at high tide. When I swam out last year at low tide you the water came right up to the outside edge (you could walk around about 3/4 of it). A big picture of the lighthouse was on the front page of the newspaper last week (Post and Courier I think...although it MAY have been The State). I didn't get to read it yet but the title sounded like they may be starting stabilization of the lighthouse. You can go to www.savethelight.org if you are interested in learning more. I'm glad there are some other people that care about this very old structure! Thanks again for the comments and thoughts!

Thanks, Tyler. Yes, I remember a Coast Guard station or some such out on the northeast end of the island--I was never able to get to that part of the island, even at low tide, because of restrictions. Unfortunately, in spite of the rocks, the island will continue to wash away on that end and probably keep accumulating sand on the southwestern end. Inlets in that part of the world migrate to the southwest with the Labrador current doing most of the work, day in and day out. Once in a while a hurricane will cut a new inlet, such as (I believe) Oregon Inlet on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. The winter storms typically erode more beaches than hurricanes, but I think that it is the daily grind of the Labrador Current that does most of the moving from northeast to southwest on the SC coast.

 

One disturbing (and as yet unexplained phenomenon) is that Hunting Island has been eroding in the middle of the island, whereas in the past the most erosion was occurring at the northeastern end. It makes you wonder about the shape of the bottom offshore to cause such things to happen.

 

I really wonder how far down that old lighthouse is anchored. When I used to see it out there as a kid (in the fifties), I never imagined that it would still be around a half century later.

 

If you are like me, Tyler, you want above all to keep a record of how things were. Someday the light is almost bound to go, and people will treasure these old pictures.

 

Do you ever think about how many of your photos are being downloaded on hard drives by persons who know this part of the world and who want some record of it? I think about that a lot, even though snapping so many documentary shots takes away time that might have been better used to make me into a more artistic photographer.

 

It is for that reason that I never worry about whether I shall ever sell a single picture. I have never sold a single file or print, although I have given some big prints away.

 

A lot of my life was spent on Folly Island while growing up, before it got seedier and seedier, even before the groins were put in place. I can remember streets and piers that no longer exist. Thank you for the view from the one part of the island that I was never allowed to go to.

 

--Lannie

this is a wonderful photo tyler !!!! and i love the T-I-T-L-E...

 

 

all my best..

~trish~