Starry Night is the product of pulling an all nighter watching the movement of the stars through the night. This image capture started around 11:30 pm and continued until about 6:00 am when the first light touched the foreground to give a little light for context. The earth moves around the magnetic north so when you are looking at the North Star, this is what you would see if you track the stars movement through the sky. It reminds me of Vincent Van Gogh's famous painting because of the similar swirls in the sky in his painting.
I am absolutely in love with the landscape of the Lowcountry of South Carolina. The marsh colors change from season to season and even within a day, you have so much change with the ebb and flow of the tides. I have tried for a long while to capture the feel of these grand landscapes which is so difficult to achieve. This image was created at dawn looking east over Hamlin Sound with Isle of Palms on the right and Mount Pleasant on the left. The light was just right this morning and allowed me to capture 81 separate images that I spent the next few weeks joining together into a super panoramic which is often presented and best appreciated in very large sizes often exceeding 100 inches.
At first look, this image I create at Pickney Island NRA looks like like an icy and snowy landscape. Living in the Lowcountry, luckily we don't have too many of those types of days. This was actually shot on a 85 degree day using a camera I have had converted to only see Infrared light. Infrared is the wavelength of light just longer than visual light that we see. Living greens such as grasses, bushes and tree leaves reflect more infrared light so they are rendered lighter than everything else and skies are usually very dark/high contrast. This creates an etherial feel to the areas we commonly see as much different. In this image, I used 720nm infrared which allows the hint of the blue in the sky to come into the scene.
This image is one in the "Painting with Light" series. This is a series of photo impressions where I use different techniques in the camera such as long shutter speeds and camera movements to abstract the scene and capture just the feel and impression of the Lowcountry. In my studio, I print these as gallery wrapped canvas pieces that are typically fairly large, often in the 40x60" size.