Yesterday Chris and I decided to check out a little photography museum in Daytona Beach, Florida, the Southeast Museum of Photography. Daytona is about 91 miles from Melbourne, connected by both I-95 and U.S. Highway 1. We opted for the slower  scenic route via US Highway 1, which meant a more than 2-hour drive.

The museum is on the campus of the Daytona State College and is associated with the Southeast Center for Photographic Studies department at the college. An exhibit currently on view  in the  museum celebrates the 50th anniversary of the program.  It was impressive to see the number of alumni active in Central Florida, most of who have commercial photography studios. One example was David Roark, who is the photographer at Disney Studios. A couple of his advertising photos for Disney made me smile, including this clever  “The Force is calling” ad,  which is the photo at the bottom of the page at this link.

Another fun set of photos were action shots involving things on water by a photographer named Tom King. Here’s a link to my favorite one of his in the show, which is a multiple exposure stop-motion shot of a wake-boarder flying over the wake behind a boat.

Another current exhibit Chris had seen on the museum’s website turned out not be at the museum at all. It was done by then, but mounted off in a community center somewhere else in town.  We used Gigi to navigate to find the building, and I thought she was taking us the wrong way at one point when she had us turn left off the main road onto a narrow side street surrounded by lots of vegetation and few buildings.  But I need to learn to trust Gigi: just when I was thinking we should back, the vegetation on the left of the road suddenly opened onto a clearing and revealed a parking lot and a community center building where the photography exhibit was displayed. Chalk one up for Gigi!

Now, the exhibit had been billed as a sort of “then and now” type of show with photos of the Midway neighborhood in Daytona taken in 1943 compared with ones from 1999. The 1943 were by American photographer Gordon Parks, and they were interesting to see, since they included quite a nice cross-section of people and life in the Daytona Midway neighborhood.  However, there wasn’t much information about the 1999 photos, and there weren’t that many of them to begin with.   Ah well.  At least the historic ones were fun to see.

We didn’t really have much time to roam around Daytona Beach other than our driving to the museum locations, so it felt like we just took a little dip into what the town might have to offer.  Of course, the big thing it’s known for, other than the speedway, is the beach.  We did take a quick peek at the beach, though, because we stopped for lunch at a place right on the beach. I only took a few photos, though, mostly from the parking lot where we parked to go to lunch. I kind of liked this one photo  for a little bit of wave action. But check out the sign on the pole on right:

“Illegal” Water Activity?!”  Daytona Beach, Florida

I guess the waves didn’t get the memo that “water activity” is prohibited  to the left of the pole.