Overall this was an easy setup considering I have not been to this location previously. Above all, I want to thank the LLS team for their help in loading in the gear. Following the load in, setting up three flashes in the conference room was easy. While there, I was able to make photos of all the candidates there for the kick off.
The Man and Woman of the Year Candidates are embarking on a philanthropic competition to support blood cancer research. Indeed, I have contributed to their mission by making these headshots. When they have their gala dinner to announce the winner of the competition, they display these portraits throughout the venue.
Last summer was a great opportunity to photograph shore birds. Some neighbors of my mother built nesting platforms for seahawks at the end of their pier. Along Featherstone Shores large birds will congregate and fly around the area looking for food. With the new nesting platforms, there were osprey that now stayed longer term.
At this part of the river, there are many piers that jut out into the water. With the neighbor having the platforms for the shore birds, I wanted to get a closer look. In the meantime, I took out a camera with me in case there would be a chance for some action.
Quietly, I walked out to the end of the pier, and setup my position for photographing the birds at the nest. Even though I had the longest lens that I own, I was still woefully short! Indeed birding photography requires the longest lenses to get the most outstanding images! While I had this lens racked out to 200mm, you would need something much longer to get the birds properly such as 400mm or 600mm!
To follow up from a post a few Fridays ago, I’m posting here more black and white photos I made specifically for the Facebook Black and White Challenge. Being that these were made over the holidays, we spent a lot of time with our family. The familiar surroundings sometimes makes it difficult to make new photos. The scenes are too familiar, and nuances that make for compelling images seem difficult to pick out. Sometimes, you just need to change your angle. Get higher, or get lower. That is usually my first go-to move! Here Dani, a little dachshund becomes much larger in the photo. I put my head and camera right on the ground. I took a series of photos as she sniffed around the grass. In a stroke of luck, she licked making her look like a lioness!
Dani-in-the-yard
Moody Environments
In these other photos, the mood was really helped by a thick fog rolling in from the river. It was an unusually warm air day, but the water was still cold creating the foggy scene. You could almost feel the low ceiling when you were standing by the edge of the water. Not too much noise was cutting through their either – only lapping water and shore birds. This image of the tree branches cutting through the negative space of the cloudy background made me think of canvas paintings of a coastline. This is almost exactly how the photo was captured in camera:
Trees-through-the-fog
The last took a little more work in Photoshop. I placed a neutral density (ND) filter in front of my wide angle lens. This filter does not change the color tone of the scene, it only makes it darker – like sunglasses for your camera! Putting the camera on a tripod, the ND filter allows you to lower the shutter speed which makes the moving water smooth into a blurry sheet at the bottom of the photo. To simplify the photo even more, I removed some string running across the pylons, and other piers that jutted into the left and right sides of the frame. It makes for a more minimalistic presentation that my eye likes much more than the original. Have a great weekend, readers!
