Sometimes, people elect to grab another day with us and join us for scouting and shooting before the workshop. Such was the case yesterday.

We piled into the car and took off for one of Arnie’s and my favorite locations, one that has always produced great images for us, including many you have seen here in these blogs.

Every year, because of the changing weather patterns, the azaleas and camelias come out at a slightly different time. Last year, a good portion of them were past prime when we arrived in Savannah.

This year, they are gorgeous. Everywhere we look, we see azaleas in hues of magenta, pink, apricot, and some white.

The delicate blossoms of the dogwoods add

Anyone who has been a photographer for a while knows the value of scouting, whether for an job, a personal project, or in this case, a workshop.

Regardless of the number of times one has visited an area, things can change. A wonderful old barn may have collapsed under the heavy snowfalls of that last hard winter. There is construction going on, and the background for your favorite scene is a sea of cranes and orange, plastic fencing that you really don’t want to feature. The list goes on, and we’ve all seen them in one form or another.

Given the changing landscape, it is always wise to …

OK, OK, sometimes blue skies are really stunning against, say, a white Greek building with a terra-cotta roof, and I’m not going to sit inside just because there are blue skies. But Arnie and I think cloudy and stormy skies are so much more exciting. My mother was a very accomplished artist. She used a lot of Paynes Gray for her own moody skies, as there is a lot of violet in that color. If you think of the color wheel, that is why spring greens, that contain a lot of yellow, pop against those stormy skies. Those color combinations make images sing.

A couple of years ago, during our workshop in Virginia, we had terrible weather — torrential rains and gray skies — and we made amazing photographs. The colors were …