The fantastic coastline and mid and south eastern coast of US can not only boast of gorgeous sunrises & sunsets, but when everything goes well, you can get some amazing blue hour at twilight. The beaches along the North & South Carolina coastlines provide amazing opportunities for sunset & blue hour photos, especially at those which have fishing piers.
From the rocky coasts of Maine that boasts of some of the most photogenic lighthouses on the east Atlantic coast, to some of the more popular Atlantic beaches like the Folly Beach, Virginia Beach, Myrtle beach to the more isolated but gorgeous beaches & fishing piers of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
The above photo is a grand panorama of the Kure Beach at sunset. You can see the golden-orange color of the sky reflected on the ocean surf. All these sunset & twilight images were photographed through winter months. At winter, the water is usually very cold, often so cold that you can feel it stinging your feet like needles every time the waves roll in.
The picture above & below are the same fishing pier at Myrtle beach. Usually the Myrtle Beach is one of the most popular beaches during spring & summer seasons with almost no place to put your foot on the beach, especially when the temperature is high and the surf is high.
However, in the cold months and especially cold evenings of winter are a different story. You get the beaches all to yourself, all the 4 miles! The blue hour picture below probably gives you some idea of the icy cold water. You can almost feel the iciness by looking at the reflection on the surf.
These sunset & blue hour panoramas are photographed using Nikon digital. I usually use a combination of both AF & PC lenses depending on how large I want the panorama to be. Most of the panorama images on the online shop are about 6′ – 10 feet wide & done by stitching several individual shots together in Lightroom.
What makes creating these panoramas even more fun is the long exposure. During sunsets and especially during the blue hours, the sunlight changes color, temperature and intensity extremely fast. So when taking multiple images to make a panorama, you have to be careful to take care of these elements to make the final panorama worth it.