Late March 2016 – the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin were in full bloom. Since this is a regular occurrence, it is an annual event for me to arrange. As can be seen in the photos, I am not the only one with that idea!
I am a sucker for these beautiful blooms. For one thing, they are highly publicized when they are ready to flower, so everyone has plenty of time to plan. Although the crowds get larger every year, they are still worth going through the hardship to see.
They also signal the end of a long winter in the light of springtime popping up in the gardens around the blossoms. Undeniably, they add so much to the urban photo made of our nation’s capital. Moreover they signify a peace between the USA and Japan that is rekindled every Spring.
You can easily spend hours at the Tidal Basin in order to see the blossoms in different light. As the sun dips in the horizon, the colors will change for the most part. With the easy walk in the city, it is worth taking the time.
It has been about a week since my last posting – I have not fallen off the face of the Earth! We took an extended weekend to attend a wedding out of town. Of course, I took my camera with me. Now I have a whole slew of images that will make it on the blog soon. Today, though, I want to go back to a family get together to describe a looser, or a freer way of shooting to get a different style of images.
This late afternoon was very warm outside. What better way to cool off, than to play with some water guns? The ammo is unlimited, and everyone is a friendly target! This was a perfect time to try a specific technique for photographing kids that I have seen a few times but have not tried myself. First thing to consider – my professional camera bodies are weather-sealed at all of the openings. The connection between the lens and the lens mount is covered by a piece of rubber. This will keep the opening sealed for light water exposure. I have photographed with this camera and lens combination in the rain while covering a football game with no problems. I keep a towel handy, and would stop if there is a chance that much more water will be close.
Knowing that I my camera could stand the water from the guns, I set the camera to a manual exposure so that the settings would not have to change as I fired off frames, and I had the shutter speed set high enough to ensure there would not be blurred photos while running. I had my nephew chase me and shoot at me with his water gun while I ran backwards with my camera pointing towards him. It was easy to get some neat shots of the water coming right towards the camera!
Be prepared to delete a lot of photos when you shoot this way. Lots of times, the composition was not perfect, and sometimes I would miss him completely, but so many of these came out nice. I do not think I could have composed these spontaneous images with my head behind the camera, and directing the scene. Sometimes, you have to just let that control go, and hope for the best. It’s just like having fun – you cannot plan every detail, but you may have better results than you planned!
It just happened, but I am already missing the cherry blossoms this year. The photos from this year’s blooms were really satisfying. The weather, and the amount of time that I had to take advantage of their peak really came together nicely. Morning, afternoon, and evening, were all available to me this time. Moreover, I did not have to rush around as in other years. There were so many photographers around the Tidal Basin this year, with all kinds of gear! There were so many that were trying different angles, and strategies to get the perfect photo. I joined them with my own attempts. Of course, not everything will work when you first try, and this was probably my biggest disappointment.
From this spot, most images are of the blossoms in the foreground with either the Washington Monument in the background towards the left, or the Jefferson Memorial towards the right. In between these two familiar sites is a clear view of the Capitol Building that is much further away. Because of the distance, it is much smaller than the other two memorials in the frame. Consequently it is not as popular a subject from here.
But I wanted to try going for it since it seemed really easy to see this morning. I used the longest lens I had in the bag, a 105mm focal length. This was giving me what I wanted as anything much longer would have made the building larger, but the blossoms would have been harder to distinguish. In the first frame above without any added light, the blossoms were really in shadow, and look like really ugly clouds or debris in front of the lens.
My next thought was that I should add some light from a speedlight to illuminate the blossoms, and show off more of their color. I held the flash off of the camera with a sync cord so that the light would not be positioned directly in front of the blooms. Here is the result:
It was as expected, but not that great to my eye. I tried a few more frames changing the flash power, the angle of the flash, but it did not change much. Perhaps I could have tried “painting” on the light with a small flashlight or had a softer modifier for the speedlights, but I did not have any more time as the sun started to rise quickly out of the horizon really changing the look of the overall scene. Turns out – THAT was what I needed to make a better frame.
