Counting on the predictable weather in the Washington, DC Metro area is not a good business to place your bets. There are so many factors that the meteorologists will say contribute to the fickle nature of weather in this area. Predicting the peak bloom for cherry blossoms is also an annual ritual that can be difficult to time correctly. We have invited many out-of-town guests to come for the occasion, but the window for their best viewing is only a few days at most. This year had to have been some of the best blossom-viewing time I have ever witnessed. After a LONG winter, we had warm mornings with no precipitation. The winds were kept to a minimum so the fragile blossoms stayed on the trees for as long as they could. I took advantage of the luck, and made a trip to the Tidal Basin early before sunrise, and in the middle of the day just to see the blooming trees, the flowers, sun, the crowd, and all the activities.
Yes this blog post is very late today. I do have a good reason, though. The cherry blossom trees in Washington, DC are in peak bloom! Being a native northern Virginian, this has been an annual outing for my family for a VERY long time! The earliest photo that I have of my swaddled very well was less than a year after I was born. The crowds were a little less packed that the ones today, but there were already a flood of people walking the Tidal Basin with their best cameras in tow.
I am about the same age today as my mother was in the photo on the left. She still enjoys walking through the blooms, and taking lots of photos! It has never become cliché, and if anything, the event has become more popular than ever. It is inspiring to see so many photographers out there! And I don’t just mean at the peak times in the middle of the day. You have to carve out a spot even an hour before sunrise! That is another testament to digital technology making photography more accessible.
Yes it does look like there is a lot of competition for photographers out there – and there is. For me, though, this is something I would do whether or not this was my main profession. But knowing what people do for photos out there really pushes me to make even better photos! There are just as many visions for capturing images as there are people behind the camera. The tools may be similar, but they can be manipulated in an almost infinite number of ways!
Get out there this weekend before the blooms blow away! They are already starting to fall from the trees as of Friday evening. I have lots of editing to do with the many photos made over the passed few days. I’ll be sure to update the blog as I finish them. Happy Spring!
Ever go through a series of photos to see a spot at the same place on every image? Digital cameras have made so many advancements in convenience, and accessibility to photographers. Just going around the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC to look at cherry blossoms, you can see the impact. I can remember going walking around the blooms when I was younger with many cameras around, but not nearly to the extent that there is today.
Shooting with film, however, did have some advantages. One of them was that the “sensor” was cleaned EVERY single time a photo was taken. The film was nicely protected in a hard plastic cartridge, fed through a tiny slit that wiped the sides of the film clean before it was placed in position to be exposed. After an exposure was made on the frame, it was moved out of the way as a new part of the film was moved into place – there was no reuse of the same section – unless you had a failure of your mechanical system, or were very advanced in your multiple-exposure plan for your image.
When taking landscape or other travel images where you are exposing large parts of clouds or open sky, digital cameras will show you spots where there is dust on your sensor. When shooting landscapes from a tripod, you have the luxury of using low ISO and a stopped-down aperture. Using these settings, it will be very evident where dust spots are on your sensor. When the using more open apertures, the dust will be too close to the sensor to be seen in your images. Regularly shooting at f/4 or below, you may not notice that you sensor even has any dust!
This image looked perfectly fine at the time I took it at the Air Force Memorial. When I brought it into Lightroom and took a look at the images at 100%, there were so many spots. Here is a screen shot of the image where each circle is a point from the “Spot Removal” tool. I have made them larger if you would like to download and see how bad this case was.
