Archive of ‘Travel’ category

Black and White Challenge – Part 1

Tysons, Virginia

Are any of you familiar with this Black and White Challenge that was spread throughout Facebook late last year? At this time, I had seen a few of my friends post up some incredible images. Overall, I thought that it was a great way to push you to make some new monochromes images for sharing. It works by posting up images 5 days in a row. With each submission, you nominate another person to the challenge which keeps it proliferating online. I’d like to thank Jae for nominating me to participate, and I enjoyed sharing the images! Luckily, I had some client-work coming up, so I did not have to look far for some situations in making some new images.

Santa-Claus-waving
Santa-Claus-waving

I was scheduled to photograph a bar mitzvah that had some great lighting setup by the event planners. The uplighting created a nice contrast to my flash which always makes for some nice black and white images.

Alexandria, Virginia

Bar-Mitzvah-Hora-dance-©TimeLine-Media
Bar-Mitzvah-Hora-dance-©TimeLine-Media

The other schedule shoot was at Tysons Corner Center. They had an outdoor Christmas market setup on the Plaza. They wanted to get some nice overhead views of the plaza and ice rink with lots of people doing their holiday gift-shopping. I thought that evening would work best with the light as is usual for most landscape photography. The best angle was to go into the new Tysons Tower to get an overhead view of the shopping with the expanding northern Virginia area as a backdrop. I was just lucky to get that nice colorful after-sunset sky. Although there is no color in the submitted photo, there was still a nice gray gradient in the empty upper right of the frame. I enjoyed the chance to photograph from such a great vantage point, and to be lucky enough to see it at a perfect time of day.

Tysons-Corner-Center
Tysons-Corner-Center

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Analysis Paralysis | Tech Tuesday

Outer Banks North Carolina

Analysis Paralysis will sometimes stall a creative process. It has been a while since I have posted! We have been busy with a lot of events, and we even took some time to go on some trips all around the country. I am back and finally getting some time to go through the photos. While going through the photos, I recall a question that my cousin asked as we were walking around his city. He asked – how do you find better landscape compositions?

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse – ©TimeLine Media

I believe it is a combination of just shooting, and refining. Trying to overthink a photo when you arrive to a location can really take away from your enjoyment of your visit. Also, it may prevent you from getting any images at all! If it is a popular tourist, or familiar landmark like these North Carolina coastal lighthouses, you have a lot of images in your mind already. I always take these classic or overdone photos if I can to add them to my personal collection. But then, I use the digital tools, the back of the camera to review and get a better images before I leave the location. Here we found a nice dune overlooking the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. My first thought was to use my ultra wide lens to get a lot of the sky with the lighthouse in the far background.

Cape Hatteras through wide angle lens - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras through wide angle lens – ©TimeLine Media

Working a Scene

Not good. You can’t even see the lighthouse and the frame is dominated by large areas of sand and coastal grasses. I did not see anything that was worth trying again, so I changed lenses. I wanted to bring the lighthouse to a more prominent part of the frame, so I put the 105mm lens onto the camera.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse – ©TimeLine Media


This is better. The lighthouse is larger in the frame, but I now see new distractions. There is a paved parking lot for visitors, and a radio tower both of which I did not even see in the first attempt. At least I solved how I wanted the lighthouse to look in the frame. Now I just needed to move my position slightly to move the distractions out of the frame.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse – ©TimeLine Media


Crouching in between the coastal grasses gave me this frame. Most of the distractions are out of the way. I like how the out of focus coastal grasses are leading your eyes to the lighthouse that is rendered sharply. But a few of the tips are a little too large, so they can take the attention away.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse - ©TimeLine Media
Cape Hatteras Lighthouse – ©TimeLine Media


Just moving a few feet allowed me to find my final position. Nothing is blocking the body of lighthouse, and all the grasses are a consistently small size in the photo. I did have to crop a little from the left to completely get rid of the radio tower, but I am happy how this turned out. I really enjoyed making this image, but spent a lot of the rest of the day painfully picking out “hithchikers” that grabbed onto my sneakers.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

iOS Camera Improvements | Tech Tuesday

There has been a lot of excitement lately with the new iPhone 6 and iOS camera improvements from Apple. Even though I am not upgrading from my iPhone 5, I am enjoying using the new features that come from the operating system update. Smartphones are really quite amazing in what the programmers can add and change without having a change to the hardware. As a photographer that is used to having more control over the exposure, I like the ability to have more controls. Previously, you hold your finger over a part of the image to set an area to meter the exposure. This really helps to get some control over the brightnes in the photo.

Monterey, California

Monterey Bay Aquarium - ©TimeLine Media
Monterey Bay Aquarium – ©TimeLine Media

In the new iOS 8 version of the camera, you can still specify a point to get a meter reading. Now, an additional control has been added. To the side of the box that pops up after you select a metered area, there is a sun icon that appears. You can then move that sun up to increase the exposure, or down to decrease the exposure from that point. This really came in handy as we walked through the amazing displays at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Monterey Bay Aquarium - ©TimeLine Media
Monterey Bay Aquarium – ©TimeLine Media

The glass that they use for display is so clear. You can put your smartphone right up to the glass without getting bad reflections through the lens. They also control the amount of stray light coming in with their darkened rooms,. This really puts the animals front and center. With the new exposure controls, I could ensure that the meter readings were taken from the bodies floating in the water, then took down the exposure. This helped to make a faster shutter speed to keep the subjects sharp, and helped to pop them out of the background. This was probably my most re-tweeted image yet!

Monterey Bay Aquarium - ©TimeLine Media
Monterey Bay Aquarium – ©TimeLine Media

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703-864-8208

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