Mount Pleasant – JWNPhoto.com

Articles Tagged with: Mount Pleasant

Pictures of Kayla

Kayla came by for a photo shoot as a gift from her mother. Like most teenage girls, she’s got a busy schedule of school, sports, and family life and it was my job to capture that energy of youth.

We started off in my studio and gave her the model photo shoot experience, fans blowing and all. There’s definitely a dynamic in her set of photos that showcases the many layers of this southern teenager. She’s sweet yet edgy, and I think you can see a different personality in each of these shots.

We headed to the park under the Ravenel Bridge in Mount Pleasant to put a glorious sunset behind her. The shot at the top shows a sensitive girl, yet you wouldn’t realize how bitingly cold it was down there that night from it. Here’s one of my favorite shots of the shoot, she’s got her mom’s coat on and is warming up and I took this shot of here off her guard:

We ended up in downtown charleston and put Kayla in some classic areas, including this shot of her in an alleyway in the French quarter. This is my absolute favorite shot of the session photographically because of the mixed light and the texture. It’s a priceless backdrop 😉

I love the connections photography makes with a family – after this shoot, Kayla’s mom had me shoot her future daughter-in-law’s bridal portraits, which I’ll be able to show you after her big day. It’s those connections with humanity that are the heart of what I love about photography!

Kara & Bryan

I just wanted to share a couple of my favorite shots from a recent engagement shoot I did in Charleston, SC.

We managed to get quite a few looks in two locations, the Charleston Waterfront Park and then sunset shots such as the one below at Mount Pleasant’s Waterfront Park! What can I say, I like the waterfront parks 😉

The couple was great and I hope they have an awesome life together!

4th of July Fireworks

I was on my way to Folly Beach to catch their fireworks display for the third year in a row when I remembered that I forgot the batteries to my camera in the charger at home! We had a long day – our neighborhood hosted a July 4th picnic and parade which my wife had a huge hand in organizing with the Indigo Women’s Group. It was ridiculously hot today, and there may have been some rum in my sodas.

I was also tasked with shooting the event and taking some portraits. Here’s a shot of my daughter Mackenzie wearing some crazy patriotic hat:

So after the parade, I put the battery in the charger and downloaded all of the pics to my computer (I still haven’t even gone through all of those yet except for the two in this post). I then took a nap before heading to the neighbors house for an Independence Day cookout. I timed my trip to the beach without much room for error as to enjoy maximum grilled bacon-wrapped jalapeno goodness. When the time came, I hopped in my car and got about 10 minutes into my journey when it dawned on me that my battery was still in its charger at home. Damn you sun and rum! I did the math and realized that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the beach in time. I had to come up with a plan B.

I know from history that any family event in Mount Pleasant is always over-populated. If I was going to catch the fireworks over the U.S.S. Yorktown, Waterfront Park in Mount Pleasant has the best view, but also the most people. I was going to take a chance anyway since it was also the closest. I got very lucky in so many ways. 1st, the bridge was still open (they close it during the show). 2nd, I found a place to park within a 5 minute walk to the park. 3rd, I found a relatively people-free spot right on the marshy banks of the Cooper river. The stars had aligned and I was able to capture these:

You can check out all of my shots here on Flickr, and also on my Facebook page.

I was thinking earlier today about one of my favorite things about living in a free country. For all of the bitching and moaning we do about what’s wrong with our government, the fact that we can bitch and moan about our government is something I think we all take for granted. Freedom of speech is something our founders were willing to die for, and it’s something our military, which is a volunteer military, is still willing to die for. It truly is my favorite freedom.

I hope you all had as sunny and bright a day as I did! Happy 4th of July!

Summer 2012 Senior Portrait Package

Announcing my Senior Portrait Package & Facebook Friends Special!

Here’s the deal, if you book this package for the extremely reasonable price of $399, I will knock it down to $379 if you share the ad shown above on your Facebook wall with your friends! You’ll need to make sure you “Like” my page here. Then you can easily click the “share” button on this image here.

Also, if you book this package and then successfully refer a friend who also books any type of session with me, I’ll give you a 2nd 11×14 print!

Here’s the package details:

On Location Shoot With At Least 4 Different Looks
Digital Copies of Final Edits
High Quality Prints:
1x 11×14
2x 8×10
4x 5×7
6x 4×6

Contact me today and book this package and let’s make a special portrait for your senior.

Hurricane Irene In SC

I woke up yesterday much like every other day. Late in the morning I got the phone call from my wife, “They’re closing the schools down” she said. It seemed like Irene was going to hit us and destroy life as we knew it (well, that is what they told us if you had read any news websites or looked at one of the many 24 hour news channels on the old fashioned TV).

Low and behold, the rain came down pretty hard for about 5 minutes as I drove through the Charleston area. The wind was blowing enough to make some palm fronds and grass bow down (although they pretty much always do that at the coast – they’re very amiable to swift breezes).

On the porch of one apartment complex in Mount Pleasant, a toad took refuge in a corner. You know it’s bad when the frogs are out.

The destruction was imminent. Just look at what this demolition site at the old Navy Base looked like during the heart of the storm. It was quite frightening, even though it has looked like this for months now – how long does it take to tear down a building anyway?

Not knowing what to do, I hurried home (after I was done working) and evacuated my house. I left the dogs though because someone had to guard my stuff. My wife and I dropped the kids off at a friend’s house and we did what most upstanding citizens would do during a hurricane – we went out for drinks at Taps. We had to forage for food though, so I walked across the parking lot and got some Mexican food from Senor Tequila. While I was walking, I noticed that the sky was on fire, so I took out my iPhone and snapped this:

After quite a few rounds of hoppy dark goodness, my wife dragged me home. The next thing I knew, I was waking up this morning with a slight headache. I quickly ran to the medicine cabinet and downed some Aleve. The dogs wanted to go outside because they tend to do that, and to my horror I saw the destruction Irene left in my yard.

It’s gonna take me minutes to clean up these leaves. Oh, the humanity. The rain even filled my children’s wagon (well, it did earlier this week from one of those late summer storms – I just never got around to dumping it). A leaf even made it’s way in there as well – Mother nature is not one to be fucked with.

Palmetto Islands County Park

On Sunday we took a trip with some friends to the Palmetto Islands County Park in Mount Pleasant, SC to let the kids burn off some energy and enjoy perfect spring weather.

The kids had fun on the Big Toy Playground, and eventually we moved the fun over to the observation tower, which has another play area built off of it. This is great because the kids can climb and slide while the parent relax up top to enjoy the view.

While up at the top, my wife spotted this little bluebird on the branches of a tree right next to the tower. When I zoomed in on the bird, I noticed that it had caught lunch in its beak!

The park is called Palmetto Islands because it is a series of little islands in the marshland connected by boardwalks. We decided to take a hike and explore a little.

We made it to the last island which was home to some fishing docks. I had this great shot of the kids all lined up looking into the water off the edge of the dock and before I could squeeze the shutter, they decided to get up and go to the other side. Darn you meddling kids! Luckily, our buddy Krista had the mom-like reflexes to tell the kids that there was an awesome turtle on the other side and they all came back wide-eyed as can be looking for a reptilian swimmer. Hence, I was able to get this shot:

As we hiked along, I took advantage of the plethora of palm fronds and tried to manipulate my position and the palms themselves to catch the sunlight in interesting ways. The photo up at the top of this post was magnificently back-lit, while this photo was taken half in shadow:

Patriots Point Seabirds

There’s a spot at the Charleston Harbor Marina to the side of the marina offices out in the water where there are six pilings whose only purpose seems to be as a resting spot for the local seabirds.

I find myself working in those offices and usually walk around the side of to check out what’s going on on the pilings – usually, I’m only armed with my iPhone, which was used to take this photo below:

Last week I decided to bring my camera with me out on the docks and took some shots of the pelicans, seagulls, and cormorants.

This double-crested cormorant just landed after taking a swim and needed a place to dry off:

I haven’t posted anything in a week, so I thought I’d share this with you. I’ve got some fun things coming up, so don’t think I’m slacking off or anything!

Evans Rehearsal Dinner

I had the pleasure of shooting a wonderful couple’s wedding rehearsal dinner at Waters Edge at Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant, SC this weekend.

Beau and Kathryn Evans are two beautiful people whose awesome mother, Donna Evans hired me to shoot this event for their family.

I wanted to share with you some of my favorite pics from the evening. We had a great location at a great time of day with perfect weather – You couldn’t ask for a better combination!

There was music, shagging, and shucking, oh my!

The more events I photograph, the more I realize how important it is to know your camera inside and out. I can’t tell you how often I double-check my camera and almost every time I do I find that a crucial setting has been changed, a button mashed, or dial spun that would have otherwise ruined or missed a moment. I don’t know how many times I would find myself chimping the LCD screen in the past – after a number of phantom setting changes, I do get real paranoid that I’m blowing the shots! The more I do this though, the less I need to check my screen because I accept that while I’m communicating with subjects, and squeezing through crowded bars, my camera is busy taking on a life of its own, so I check my settings before I press the shutter.

It’s also handy to keep a mental baseline of settings for each environment you shoot in. That way you can quickly reset the camera to that baseline and work up from there. I still find shooting people at sunset is the hardest time because the light changes so drastically with every passing second. Event photography is very fast-paced, so any method you employ that will gain you precious seconds looking through the viewfinder is the difference between getting a great moment or just missing it.

Walking The Shem Creek Bridge

1/30th of a sec | f/2.8 | 17mm | ISO 200

Last night I was driving through Mount Pleasant as I find myself doing on a pretty frequent basis, and the time was right, the location was right, and I was prepared. I approached Shem Creek just as the sun was bidding adieu to the coast of South Carolina and pulled into a parking lot. I slung my camera on my shoulder set to manual mode with a fixed ISO of 200 and started walking up the bridge. As I approached the middle, I quickly brought the camera up to my eye and checked the internal light meter. As I tend to do, I made it set to be ever so slightly under-exposed and started firing away. this is what I caught:

1/80th of a sec | f/5.6 | 55mm | ISO 200

I dug the foreground of the boardwalk, so now I wanted to isolate the mid-ground area a bit more. I took a few steps forward and zoomed in a little to get this:

1/100th of a sec | f/8.0 | 72mm | ISO 200

All the while I keep adjusting my exposure values – specifically the aperture and shutter speed. In the moments just after a sunset, every second that passes dramatically changes the light. Once again I took a few more steps forward and zoomed in a bit tighter to get this:

1/60th of a sec | f/7.1 | 100mm | ISO 200

I checked the back of my camera and knew I had the shot I wanted. Now It was time to explore. I kept walking and came up to a glorious blue building that rents kayaks and has a seafood market in the back. How blue is it?

1/20th of a sec | f/4.5 | 55mm | ISO 200

That’s pretty damn blue. I needed to capture the entrance to the building. When you get that kind of red against that kind of blue, you can’t go wrong.

1/20th of a sec | f/4.8 | 125mm | ISO 200

I really dug the convergence of lines from the wood siding and the angles of the metal roof. The light was really starting to fade, so I switched out to a faster lens and shot this:

1/13th of a sec | f/2.8 | 50mm | ISO 200

I decided to look down off the side of the bridge and lo and behold, there were a couple of pelicans perched a few feet below me. I braced the camera on the railing of the bridge and composed some shots of the big birds.

1/30th of a sec | f/2.8 | 50mm | ISO 200

When shooting in this low amount of light at pretty slow shutter speeds it’s quite difficult to capture these birds sharply. They never cease twitching their beaks and adjusting themselves when you are as close as I was. It’s best to set your shutter to burst mode and let it rip once you have your composition. You can shoot a dozen shots and possibly only get one that’s decently sharp if your lucky! You could always bring out a flash, but you’ll get one chance before you send that bird soaring to the other side of the creek.

1/5th of a sec | f/2.8 | 50mm | ISO 200

I was quickly losing light, I was shooting at speeds that require bracing the camera on something sturdy, and I was getting pretty damn cold (at least for just a sweatshirt – guess I wasn’t as prepared as I thought). I only had a couple of more shots left in me, so I started to get a busy composition of the waterside of the blue seafood/kayak building when one of the birds flew right into the composition and landed in the perfect spot to become the focal point of this shot:

1/5th of a sec | f/2.8 | 50mm | ISO 200

Talk about a lucky break! I started to walk back to my car and fired off the shot at the top of this post. The color in the sky was no longer as magnificent in this location (although as I drove home the colors in the sky were unusually deep – the horizon was almost brown for a few moments). I decided to create a split-tone image which basically worked out as such: I first converted the shot into a black and white image, and then I gave the highlights an orange tone and the shadows a blue tone. The result is what you see above. It can add a little more mood to a black and white image as well as make something starkly different. It definitely stands out amongst the rest of the images I shot last night.

iPhone Photo App Review – 100 Cameras In 1

The Albermarle | Charleston, SC

There are hundreds of good photo manipulation applications in the iTunes App Store for the iPhone, and a lot of them seem to favor the trend of vintage photography – a trend that is exploiting the poorer resolution of mobile phone cameras when compared to today’s full featured cameras to create a comfortable photo of moments or things that are reminiscent of the shots from affordable cameras from the time before digital. “100 Cameras In 1” attempts to separate itself from the Hipstamatics and instagrams that lead the charts by doing two unique things in it’s latest release.

The Albermarle | Charleston, SC

The first thing that sticks out for me in this app is the use of texture blending as an effect. By blending a layer of adjustable translucent texture – from rough surface areas to stones and splatters, you can add a graphical element to your photos that look as though they were printed on recycled paper with expired chemicals and a clumsy hand. This might sound messy, and to the heavy handed photo editor, it can very well be, but it can also make a common image very uncommon. Not that there’s a substitute for composing a good image, but it can force attention to an image that might get overlooked – bringing out the subtleties in a composition through it’s brand of distracting imperfections. One improvement on this would be the ability to add your own custom textures.

Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge | Mt. Pleasant, SC

This photo made while crossing the bridge above was a throw away shot that I made while trying to capture this one. In an effort to prove my point, I took this otherwise ho-hum image and gave it new life with 100 Cameras In 1. While it’s still not my favorite image by any means, it is more interesting to me than the original. The texture and color effects add mystery and intrigue – it almost makes you search for a deeper meaning to the photograph. It tasks you to search for a reason amongst the chaos of imperfection.

The other feature that is new to version 2 is the ability to change each of the 100 presets with a granular slider. Depending on the nature of the effect, “the slider will change the effect of the texture using overlay, hardlight, luminosity, the texture itself, or other methods.” states the developer, Stuck In Customs (AKA Trey Ratcliff). What this does is allow you to add a hint of an effect and combine it with other effects to create something truly original without overdoing it. The results are simply amazing, and it becomes almost too easy to create images that would take a good level of expertise in Photoshop to replicate through more traditional techniques.

The photo above is of my son – I originally took it on New Year’s day to SMS it to our pediatrician because he was swelling up from an infection. I imported the photo into 100 Cameras In 1 and started playing with the effects. I ended up with an overly saturated image using a texture that created a type of effect on his skin reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s painting style.

Here’s a promo video from the Stuck In Customs website. They have a page dedicated to information about the app, including a bunch of sample photographs as well as news and tips.

For only $2, you really shouldn’t even think twice about adding this fantastic app to your iPhone arsenal.