One of my last blogs that I posted a few months ago, I was talking about the not so winter I was having on Long Island and having to travel to Montreal to see snow. Well, that turned out to be a real bad idea, because mother nature decided to finally hit us with some bad winter weather and then follow me around for a while on my travels. One of the places I was looking forward to was Myrtle Beach. The Carolina Nature Photographers Assoc. was having its annual convention there at a hotel right on the beach. I thought to myself "boy, this is going to be nice... Beach, sand and warm weather". The beach was there, and my room on the 12th floor looked over the beach nicely, but as far as the warm weather goes, I don't think it ever went past 55 degrees. A bummer for South Carolina!
No matter what the weather is, and after this past winter I can't believe I'm complaining about 55 degree weather, I still try to find some time to shoot where ever I am. In this case the Apache Pier was within a few hundred yards of my hotel and seemed like a good place to capture some long exposure night images. I really liked the patterns in the support planks and noticed that I got a mirrored look to them when I put one of the posts directly in the center of the frame. The image below is a 30 second exposure shot at F/22 and an ISO setting at 800. I used an LED flashlight to light up the entire inner structure, since there was so much light coming from the pier itself my first few images without it came out very dark. Since LED lights can sometimes come out a little on the cool side I used one of Rouge Light Modifiers warming gel filters, that normally go onto a speedlight, over my flashlight to warm up the color a bit. Another thing to remember when using a flashlight on long exposures, always keep the flashlight moving and don't leave it pointing at one spot too long, this will cause a hot spot on your image that will not look good.

