When a picture is worth a thousand words

By Collins Doughtie

Contributor

Whenever that day comes when I go on to that next inevitable plane of existence, my family is going to have a hard time finding pictures of me should they want to display any at my going away party. Even now when I look through scrap books that I made for my kids, there are very few pictures of dear old dad because I was always the one behind the lens. It’s like I never existed at all.

Why am I writing about my own mortality? Actually, I’m not. Being on a deadline for this column isn’t always easy especially when I have been in Florida at my sister’s for nearly ten days. Sure, I could ramble on about my trip and show you all the pictures I took while I was there but that would be awfully boring. “Here I am standing in front of her pool,” and “here’s a picture of me and my wife at an art fair at Cocoa Beach”— you get the picture.

So, with only a few lazy days to come up with this column after my return, I decided to grab my camera and see what I could come up with. What always amazes me about this part of the country is that you don’t have to go far to see extraordinary sights. Maybe that’s true about just about any region of the country but being somewhat biased toward the slowcountry, I’ll bet I could walk a four-square block area around my house and have enough quality pictures to fill a book. With time running short before my editor started panicking, I decided to do just that. I will say that I strayed a bit further than those four blocks but finding images worthy for print was easier than I could have ever imaged. I hope you will agree with the images I chose. Oh yeah, Happy Holidays!

Collins Doughtie is a 60-year resident of the Lowcountry, is a sportsman, graphic artist, and lover of nature. Collinsdoughtie@icloud.com