Super tide at Pawleys Island 12 '12

 

   Flood warnings have been  posted all along the South Carolina coastline today  due to a super high tide. Far from wanting to flee the in-coming tide, Bruce and I rushed to the end of our street  to see what the high tide would do to Pawleys Island Marsh. In short, it turned it into a  gigantic mirror. With no place to go, many of the marsh birds huddled together on bits of debris like a still life stranded between an infinite sea and sky.  It was beautiful.  When I finally got around to reviewing the photos I had taken, I thought I had mistakenly set my camera on a black and white setting.  They were all nearly near monochromatic.  But no, it was just that I was so focused upon capturing the photo ops before me  that I failed to notice the lack of color in the scene.  I love how the gray-scale quality of the sky and water amplifies the stark nearly abstract design of the solid objects.

Brookgreen Gardens Night of a Thousand Candles 12 '12

Once again we attended Brookgreen Gardens Annual  "Night of a Thousand Candles" Festival.
I always look forward to this holiday light extravaganza.

 I attend this festival every year in hopes of obtaining some great reference photos to use as the basis for holiday themed Nocturns I did get some good photos of the garden at night,  but this year I was a bit disappointed in the event.

For one thing, the Gardens oversold the event and it took patrons forty five minutes of stop and go driving just to get from the front gate to the parking lot.

Then the  the gardens themselves seemed a lot sparser this year than last. I understand the need for pruning overgrown plants, but why not wait until after their major event of the season is over, or at least fill the barren beds with  some annuals .They had also changed the light displays so that they seemed  quite similar from one garden area to the next.  Bruce liked that, but I thought it monotonous. I liked it better in previous years when there were more areas with colored lights

Of course there were the usual selections of wandering bagpipers, Celtic musicians, bell ringers etc.

and some beautiful  holiday floral displays.But many of those were things I could have enjoyed just as well by daylight. So I am hoping that next year the garden flower beds will be planted  and lit as well as their indoor displays were this year.