I went to Old Car City in White, Georgia on my own since the weather was nice and I had the time. I had hoped this would be a camera club event, but the weekend weather recently has been miserable.
The place had deteriorated a lot since I was last there a few years ago. What were interesting old cars are now mostly just rusted hulks. But I did find a few things to shoot.
Got in a couple of outings late in the month. One was a hike along the Appalachian Trail from Woody Gap wet to the top of Ramrock Mountain. This is not a terribly long hike, but the climb up the mountain was more than enough to wear us out.
The second was a very good sunrise on Jan 31. The light wasn’t great until a bit after the actual sunrise. Then the reflections and clouds became very interesting.
On January 16 we had snow, something we get here about three times every two years or so. It was a wet, heavy, sloppy snow. Good for building snowmen but not so good for pictures since it weighed down the branches and clumped up. I much prefer the light, fluffy snows that are common further north. Anyway, I got one shot out the window on the 16th and the others the next day on a walk in a nearby park.
I did not get out much in the first half of the month for a variety of reasons, most of which had to do with weather. But I did get a couple outings. First, a few of us from the camera club went to the Savoy Automobile Museum in Cartersville, GA. This is a new museum, but it is very nice. And then a couple days later, we finally got a sunrise worth watching.
A the Savoy Museum, the setup was nice, but the lighting and car placement presented all sorts of problems finding nice compositions to photograph. The car placement was particularly difficult because you always had other cars or people in the background. The lighting was not overly harsh, but it was enough to create all sorts of problematic reflections. Further, museum rules prohibit tripods or monopods, so it all has to be handheld. That means high ISO and some serious noise in some cases.
The sunrise a couple days later was nice but not great.
I did not get out a lot in the second half of the month, but I did get a few nice results. We drove to Raleigh, NC for Christmas with the family, but aside from one hike with the Sonny Day Hikers, I was not able to find and worthwhile compositions.
These are my favorite shots taken in 2021.
A fabulous sunrise at West Bank Park to start the month. Shot with my hiking lens, the lightweight 18-55 mm lens that came with my D40 years ago. Still does the job.
Then the weather turned to not so good, and the pickin’s were slim. I went to Sims Lake Park a couple times looking for ducks, but none were to be found. I did get some abstracts and other scenery, so it was not a complete loss. Then I got one more colorful sunrise.
The pictures are inn reverse order from when they were taken.
I got up early on a chilly Thankgiving Day to watch the sunrise, something I had not done for three weeks. The light was good until 10 minutes or so before sunrise, so I hustled to another part of the park to see what that looked like. It was good but not great. Then I walked back toward the truck and discovered very nice light coming through the trees and fog as the sun got up a bit higher.
15 of us traveled to Oconee State Park near Mountain Rest, SC for a couple days of hiking, eating and conversation. It was a great time and presented great photo opportunities as well (with one marked exception). I managed to let my D7500 and good lens fall in the lake, so many of the pictures are taken with an older camera and a fixed 35 mm lens. That made the experience just like film photography before zoom lenses were developed.
The pictures are from a walk around the lake and the trail to Tamasee Knob the first afternoon. The second morning the group hiked the trail to Hidden Falls and Disappearing Falls in the morning, and in the afternoon Amy and I visited Pigpen Falls and Licklog Falls. So I got four waterfalls in two days, none of which I had ever seen before.
Between hikes, I shot lake views at sunset and sunrise. On the hikes I shot random images of the remaining fall color. There were no clouds, but the sun was low enough to create amazing vibrant colors.
For reasons I cannot explain, the images are not in order. I hope to figure that out and correct the problem.