It is a beautiful day for some gardening! After a busy week of photos, I think I’m going to spend some time outside. Thanks to everyone that has visited the website and the blog to view photos. We especially appreciate those of you that purchase photos from recent events. These in fact keep our photography studio going, and we will work to get more photos of you out there soon!
These photos are from one of my favorite Springtime traditions. Walking along the Tidal Basin is especially fun when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. Although they do not give off any fragrance, their color balanced against blue waters and sky make for easy photos. This Spring Saturday was perfect to enjoy this DC tradition. Have you ever been to the Tidal Basin during the peak? It can be a challenge to get photos without people due to the crowds. However, a little patience can give you just the right frame.
With Adobe Lightroom, it is very easy to sort your photos by all kinds of metadata. You can have the program show you photos that only meet certain criteria. Thus, you can gain some interesting insights into your photography. Very quickly, you can see what your “favorite” lens, camera, aperture, or shutter speed is just by looking at the raw numerical data. In college, I had a lot of training in reviewing scientific data, so having this metadata available for my photography is really cool!
Adobe Lightroom
This time, I have looked at the shutter speed of all of my favorite 19000+ photos that I have kept from all of my shoots since 2004. These two photos were examples of the highest shutter speed allowed by the Nikon cameras that I use. The first is a little expected – a kite flying by the overhead sun. This was at the kite festival on the National Mall which seemed appropriate for an American-flag flyer.
The second was a little more unexpected for me – a bride in an open field just after her wedding. It was a beautiful late spring day, and the sun was out, but I don’t recall it being that bright! There was some nice shady trees behind her, and behind me, so maybe that is what I am remembering. In looking at the Lightroom adjustments, this photo did not have to be “recovered” by pushing the Exposure slider either, so this is how the photo came out of the camera.
These next two show the slowest shutter speeds I have in my portfolio. This first one was exposed for 30 seconds. This is about the limit you can keep the shutter open before the moon and the stars start to lose their roundness, and start to smear light across the frame. Even with the long exposure, the photo needed to be pushed 1.5 stops higher in software to get it like this:
This last photo is the longest exposed photo in the collection – exposed for 1378 seconds – almost 23 minutes! I was attempting to make a star trail photo in the country. There were some clouds that moved through that you can see as the white streaks on the left. This was my only real attempt to do this as there is too much light pollution to do this near my home. Unfortunately, I did not get the North Star to center the photo, and there are too many sensor spots going through the trails to really show this on a larger scale. Guess I will have to try it again sometime. Take a look through your photos and see what lies at the extremes of your shutter speed scale.
The cherry blossoms in downtown Washington, D.C. are in full bloom! Unlike the changing leaves in the Autumn, the cherries never disappoint. They always come out with vibrant colors in a nice setting setup by the National Park Service. The only question is when exactly the blooms will pop. With the colder than normal weather this year, the peak bloom was delayed until this week.
We had family and friends from out of town even make a special visit to see them. I decided to take my own photo walk this morning to get a look for myself. It is another beautiful year down at the Tidal Basin! This was my first time at the MLK Memorial too which is situated at a corner of the basin near the Lincoln Memorial, facing into basin. Since it was a weekday, I could not get to the basin very quickly with the morning traffic, so the light was not ideal. I tried my best to make some nice images with the sun higher in the sky. There were so many photographers around the basin this morning – making unique images is very tough, but I am still working on some others, but here are my favorites so far – enjoy!
This last image is one taken by my old Nikon D100 that I had converted for infrared capture by Lifepixel. I am definitely out of practice in capturing infrared images. The white balance and Photoshop conversion required to make these images view able would make a great blog post. I’m not even sure I did it correctly since it has been so long! I’ll definitely revisit these images and share more of them soon.
