The first photo may be my favorite as it captures a brilliant sun illuminating the clouds and in between the sun and clouds - just above cloud and to lower righ of sun - you can see a bird flying. You need to look close as the suns glare is overwheming. These were all shot with an 80-200 lens.

Beautiful shots!

Great shots Ice. Dam, I have to figure out how to use my D-90. LOL I still use just the auto or sports, Havent had time to read up on it.LOL Enjoy the beach

Here's a few more that I took this morning. Plenty of thunderheads scattered about and I got lucky when the sun sandwiched itself in between one.







This one is looking SSE away from the sun with the sun shining on a fairly large thunderhead over the ocean.

Ice, Those are fooking awesome!!!!!!!!! I need to learn to shoot better.

BTW- were to tonight

Lab - one good trick with a digital SLR is simply having an 28-200 lens. Zooming in lessens light and makes the photo darker and richer. I have a 28-200mm, a 50mm and 18-70mm. The latter came with the camera but the 50mm is the most versatile portrait and general lens. The 80-200 mm is best for beach landscapes. That bird I caught near the cloud was not seeable with the eye but a 200mm zoom caught it.

Last two nights were Greg Norman's and then Divine Prime with friends down here. The latter is as expensive as NY Prime. It's more of a gourmet restaurant than a steakhouse. Both were fabulous. We may do a repeat at Greg Norman's tonite as it was that good and it's quite reasonable especially with the 10% off coupon in all the local books you see down here. We leave for home Monday morning. We ate very well here and had a great meal every night. If you ever come back and go to the Aspen Grill they have an ice cream based Pina Colada that is outstanding plus they have as good a Banana's Foster (one of my favorite desserts) as anywhere I've been.

We've had great weather. Forecast everday is for scattered T-storms but we only had them (and quite brief) on two days. So we've been on the beach every day. Water temp has been a consistent 85 and now even NWS is saying 84-86 water temps at the buoys. The lifeguard station was at those temps on Monday but they just do a local water reading near shore. They have a local channel for Noaa here on TV (ch 821 which is a hi-def channel). The condo I'm renting actually has a hi-def cable box in the family room. It's so nice to have that on TV as you can always see where the storms are unless they form right over you. They do a close up radar and a wide angle showing most of NC and eastern Georgia west of Augusta as well. If a storm forms overhead, as one rapidly did as we were playing min golf the other day you can see it clearly happening. I've seen a bunch of whipcream-like rising thunderheads here, something I rarely see back home.

Great shots Ice! Nothing quite like a beach sunrise/sunset.

Some last shots taken on the morning we left.

Truly phenomenal and breathtaking photos Ice. Hope you enjoyed your time down there. No T-storms I assume?

Very few. You had way more action up here. Inland there were some 60,000 foot severe storms but they never made the coast. We had one storm the day before we left and another 15 minute storm while we were playing miniature golf. That one formed right overhead and you could see the cloud mushrooming up quickly. Seems you only see that well in tropical climates. Offshore one night there was a lot of cloud to ocean lightning strikes but they were too far offshore to photograph and because they were so far off the lightning also had that orange color from all the haze and humidity. What I found incredible is how an approacing storm would still die as it approached the coast in the evening even though we had 85 degree temps with upper 70's dews. That's what maritime air is down there. There's one spot - Oak island NC - that is the hot spot day and night on the coast and one night it registered 86 degrees at midnight with an 81 DP! And forget rad cooling down there as the wind is always blowing at 10-15mph minimum.

This was a photo I took many years ago in Myrtle. It was really a fascinating shot of morning thunderheads in the ocean. The cloud near the sun almost looks like something out of Harry Potter with a human face attached to a prancing horse. Look to the left of the sun and you can see what looks like long curly wavy hair a musician might have, under it eyes, then a small protruding nose and then an open mouth with the face staring up toward the heavens. Below that and across under the sun and then to its' right, the cloud takes on a horse like appearance. Remains one of my favorite photos. The facial part also remins me of old Roman pictures with of men with gladiator helmuts on.

The second shot is the longer view.

Ice, Great shots!!!