I got lucky at the beach

I know what you were thinking....... you were wondering if I got any good beach images on our recent trip to Sunset Beach in Calabash, North Carolina. Right????
Sure you were. Well, how do you like that one, or the one's following? Not your everyday, run-of-the-mill beach image. Right? Now, did I get lucky, or what?
Not once, not twice, but four times in the same hour.


Considering how ill prepared I was for this little excursion, I am well pleased with my attempts at capturing lightning for the first time. I wanted to travel light, photography wise, on this trip, but wanted to carry more than a point and shoot, so I mounted my old slow focusing 35-350 on a borrowed 40D (remember, my camera blew a shutter a few weeks back at the race at Barber) and headed off to the beach.
I didn't take it out on the beach until Wednesday afternoon, and then only shot some images of my son Chase skimboarding. Around sixish that afternoon, after we had cleaned up and was getting ready for burgers on the grill, I took the boys back to the beach to get a few portraits of them.
We goofed off Thursday in Myrtle Beach most of the day, then, as we were driving back to where we were staying,"It started stow-min" as we would say in the south.


Lot's and lot's of rain, wind, and lightning. It had mostly blown over by the time we got back to our humble abode, but the seed had already been planted in my little ol' noggin' 'bout trying to capture some images of the lightning. So I invited the family to go down to the beach with me to enjoy the show, but for some strange reason, everyone declined. Go figure.


Back to being ill prepared..... all I had equipment wise, was a 35-350 mounted on a borrowed 40D, so I found an old towel and headed out to the beach. By now the rain had almost stopped, so I got an umbrella out of the car. Let's see..... It's lightning and i'm walking down the beach with a fully extended umbrella in my hands. Hummmmmm. I didn't feel as safe as it sounds. Anyway, most exposures were either 10 or 20 seconds at f11 or f20 and the camera was set on the handrail of the boardwalk entering the beach with the towel used to dampen any vibrations from me standing patiently or someone walking up behind me on the boardwalk. I wouldn't have wanted to be out there more than a couple of minutes earlier, and I did wait around until the storm was very far off coast, and all I got was four lightning strikes in my frame. There were many more, and the next time i try this, I will have a wide angle lens and a tri-pod. The image at the beginning of this post was the last image I captured on that dark and stormy night.


My boys chillin' on the beach........


Chase skimboarding and terrorizing little children and old ladies.

'till next time.............