This sunset shot at Morningstar Marina in St. Simons Island is still one of my favorites to this day. It was taken in December of 2019.
I wish I could say that there was a super elaborate story behind one of my favorite images I have ever taken, but there really isn't! I was just driving home from work one day on St. Simons Island. It had been a very long day, I was tired, and I really just wanted to get home and relax. To get home, I had to drive over 3 bridges spanning the water between St. Simons Island and Brunswick, GA. After passing over the first bridge, you really have no choice but to drive all the way back to the mainland since there is nowhere to stop. However, there is a small marina just between the first and second bridges of the causeway.
This was my view as I drove over my first bridge. I was on the phone with another photographer friend of mine at the time and remember as I saw the view, I had a split decision to make. Should I stop and photograph the sunset, or should I let it pass and head home? The photographer in me couldn't pass it up, so I quickly pulled over into the marina parking lot and unpacked my tripod and camera. I wasn't prepared to shoot that day, but I was fortunate to find a battery with enough of a charge on it and an sd card with space. I proceeded to carry my tripod on my shoulder out towards the water while still talking to my photographer friend on the phone. I made it out to a covered area of the dock and set my camera up.
For those of you camera-savy people out there, my camera at the time of taking this photo was only an 18mp camera. For you non-camera people... my camera takes smaller images than most DSLRs out on the market today. And I knew that I wanted to be able to blow this image up big to put on my wall some day. So, I used a technique called "Panorama" to capture multiple images of the scene and then stitch them all together. The final image was actually 12 images in total stitched together into a 3x4 grid. That gave me the flexibility to take the whole image and crop it into different sizes without losing any quality or detail.
After making my editing adjustments in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, I ended up with my final image. In most printing cases, it is very hard to print the entire panorama, so I tend to share only part of the image. In fact, the image entitled, "Watercolor" that you see above, is a cropped variant of that panorama that received an "Honorable Mention" award during The Big Photo Show 2020 hosted by the Coastal Photographer's Guild.
This image continues to act as a reminder to me to stop and and take the extra time to shoot the photograph. Who knows? It may turn out to be one of your best!