With Michael visiting from out of town, I had my camera with me, but I rarely used it. I wanted to show him the local parks, so we hiked/walked Green Lakes on one morning and Clark’s Reservation another. We also took a peek at Delphi Falls, Chittenango Falls, and Jamesville Beach Reservoir as well. I had my camera with my every time, but rarely had the desire or occasion to use it. Don’t mistake me, the scenery was as nice as always, but the company was better and I didn’t want to slow us down. Well … most of the time, anyway. On Saturday morning, we saw a fawn and its mother playing in the morning light across from the golf course at Green Lakes and I just had to stop to take some pictures from the car. I failed at capturing images of the fawn frolicking about as I […]
I set the alarm this Sunday morning because the skies were clear, the warm air cooled over night, and I was hoping to get out to walk the canal with mist in the air. I would not be disappointed. I dedicated myself to trying to capture every image as I wanted to see it in camera and nearly all images were captured with the dramatic BW tone in camera or with grainy film. I confess to still wishing that I had the control of in-camera jpegs akin to a Fujifilm camera, but that ship has sailed, I think. Besides, images end up getting tweaked even a little bit (crop, small exposure edits) on most occasions and I can just as (more?) easily use presets on RAW files as I can find the perfect settings in camera. It was a beautiful morning that greeted me immediately with a nice (if not […]
I thought I had figured out. Actually, I hoped that I had it figured out, but I wasn’t sure. I thought it would be close. It wasn’t. I went to Dephi Falls before the blue hour in hopes of capturing images at various stages of the evening and blending a blue hour image of the falls with the milky way above, but I quickly learned as the sky grew darker that the milky way was too low on the horizon and my hopes were dashed. The weather was perfect. The skies were clear. The temperature was comfortable, if not a bit cool. The air was calm. But the milky was would not be in view and (now that I have seen more clearly what things look like on the app and in real life) the milky way over the falls is an unrealistic get. Yes, there are times in the […]
I now have yet another YMCA of CNY Green Lakes Triathlon under my belt and this event serves as a reminder to not take the thing you love and make a job out of it. As was the case for the last few races, I was tasked with photographing racers as they exited the water and when the crossed the finish line. Both are photographically boring. When capturing folks getting out of the water, I use the 14-150mm and back-button focus on the line between the sand and the water. This year, I was capturing most images at 45mm (90mm FFeq) at aperture priority (-0.7 stop compensation for the highlights while exposing for the entirety of the frame) and there was plenty of light for me to not concern myself with shutter speed even at f/8.0 (to give me wiggle-room with depth of field). As the racers exited the water, […]
Yesterday was the most visited day of this year’s Taste of Syracuse and I was there to try to photograph the event. Personally, things went better than I could have reasonably hoped as I enjoyed engaging conversation with other photographers who shared similar interests as me. Things did not start out as I had hoped. I decided that I was going to be at the event for 3 hours and I was going to work on one thing every hour. The first hour, I would work on double exposures, the next hour I would work only with my 17mm lens, and I would spend the last hour with the 25mm. The double exposures sucked and never even survived the re-format of the card after the first hour. I did relearn that I don’t want to have the auto-gain feature turned on in camera. It flattens the contrast of each exposure […]
Victoria and Christine weren’t the only 2 people who were horseback riding last weekend. There was another couple too: Charee and Greg, who were celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary. While my focus (pun intended) was on my own family, I purposefully captured a few images of their experience throughout the mid-afternoon as well. They weren’t my best images ever. Not even close. But they weren’t permitted to use their cell phones while on the horses, so I figured any pictures that they might receive would be better than nothing. After the ride was over, I approached Charee and told her that I had captured a few images while they out and asked if she would like me to email her copies (without promising how good they might be). She expressed her gratitude and provided me with her email address. Later in the day, I would send her 7-8 images. A […]
There was definite improvement and it pleased me. The kids had no hopes or intentions of attending the Memorial Day parade in Fayetteville this year and Christine was sleeping in, so I grabbed my camera, my trinity of primes, and made my way out the door to capture some images of the pre-parade preparations. This time, unlike when I went to the run in Syracuse a few weeks ago, I knew what I needed to do. I put on the cheap Meike 25mm, flipped to manual mode, set the aperture between f5.6 and f/8, set the shutter to 1/320 of a second with auto ISO to start. As the light became brighter, I switched to aperture priority mode at ISO 200. I used the 25mm most of the day. I confess to trying the 45mm again for only 5-10 minutes when I didn’t want to get too close or bother […]
I had an hour to burn in the afternoon, so I scooped up my camera bag (with my tripod) and drove to Mill Run Park. I had been running there for the last week and had noticed how pretty the wildflowers (cough, cough … err, weeds) looked. I knew that if I waited until the weekend to try to take some pictures, they may not look as healthy as I might like, so I jumped at the opportunity when it presented itself. In the end, I walked away with a few captures that I was happy with, but only 2 that I was ultimately satisfied with after post-processing revealed that some were not as sharp and I needed. This is partly blamed away by the gently breeze that was moving the flowers to and fro, but also my reluctant to use the tripod until I had to photograph the little […]
It was another morning that I had difficulty falling back to sleep and another morning leaving the house earlier than planned with my camera. This time, I chose to travel to Chapman Park with explicit plans of playing with the ultra-wide Laowa 10mm. When I arrived, the light was pleasant and – after underestimating how close I had to be to the fishing pier to find the framing I most-desired – I was able to take a very pleasant picture of the subdued sunrise. I continued to play with the Laowa, but I had to take a brief break to capture this image with the 25mm. I saw him putting his boat in the water, swapped lens, found the right composition, and waited to see if it happened. It didn’t and I would have preferred that the boat had traveled through the frame a little lower to complete a golden […]