Winter was rather cold in Charleston this year, though sometimes swings in weather bode well for colorful skies at dawn and dusk. I missed a good sunset two weeks ago so headed to Pitt St later that week to make up for it. Clouds extinguished the setting sun quickly, but the trees had started to bud: summer is coming!
In late August, I decided to give Pitt St another go-around. The week had been rainy but cleared as it neared Friday, leaving behind some clouds and making me hope the sunset would be a bombshell of color.
In my time here so far, my two favorite places to photograph in the Charleston area are the Ravenel Bridge and Botany Bay. The bridge is simply majestic, though I don’t feel like I’ve depicted its full grandeur yet. Botany Bay at sunrise is the closest definition of tranquility that I’ve found here. Naturally, it’s difficult to photograph the boneyard at Botany Bay from a place other than Botany Bay, but there’s plenty of vantage points for the bridge. One week ago, I decided to check out a new location to shoot the bridge at sunset.
Early this weekend, I heard a car dealership advertise that it stocked “everything under the sun.” Overthinker that I am, I read into the statement and wondered how accurate it was. Turns out, this is an interesting pun because a) there is actually quite a lot to do in the Carolinas and b) the sun is out a lot here, making it possible to actually do a lot of the “quite a lot to do.”
Of course, for the July 4 Mt. Pleasant fireworks, neither analysis was particularly relevant, but the double entendre didn’t go unnoticed through the rest of the sunny weekend on a boat (!). There were a few times where red, white, and blue fireworks were in the air at the same time, but unpatriotically I managed to catch only one such explosion (detonation? I really have no idea how these incendiary terms work).
Impeccable timing! I had just written a post boasting about the serenity of dawn, and a week later (photography time, not real time) I end up actually leaving work “early” to catch the sunset and the blue moon. There are two definitions of a blue moon, but in this case, the full moon was the third in a season (rather than the second in a month). It’s been a long time since I’ve explicitly gone somewhere to watch the moonrise (the last time was in 2007 on Tolmie Peak — after work on a Monday!), but whether from a mountain or a dock, it’s always impressive how quickly the moon rises over the horizon and shrinks into a tiny dot.
