It is another busy weekend for pro photos! I helped another photographer friend shoot a beautiful wedding yesterday on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. My camera does need to get outdoors for exercise 🙂 Overall, a wedding will give you all the workout you need! While I have been photographing so many dancers, a wedding is more of a departure than I remember. At this point, I am hopeful that I was helpful for the day. There are a few more weddings on the schedule this year, so I am feeling good about them!
Also, I have to go back and review images for orders to the lab. Thanks to everyone that has gone to the website to view and purchase photos. We especially appreciate the support of our photography through purchases. It keeps us going! Here are some images from the American Star Ball pro heats.
If you are in the USA, we hope you have a nice Memorial Day weekend. Although it is a somber occasion, it is a nice break from the every day grind. Do you have any fun plans for the weekend?
This has been a busy week of shoots for me. I have been assisting on some events, and shooting some of my own. While assisting, I always learn new things in order to be successful as a photographer. Luck has been on my side to find great photographers in the area that like my work enough to have me shoot along with them. With some assignments this week, I have been to some of the nicest venues in the area. Washington, DC, being a city of decision making power, is the site of many conferences, events, and weddings. I have taken for granted so many of the things around here being a native of the area. So it has been nice to appreciate the opportunity to photograph many familiar landmarks from new angles. If it was only nicer weather this weekend, I may have been inspired to go out again. Oh, and I have to visit my mother.
Next door to the Hay Adams are other buildings with terrific views of the White House. There were lots of cameras and tents for television production setup permanently, but I did not see anyone broadcasting at the time. Now I know where all those “Reporting from Washington” views are filmed! I would be so distracted all the time if my outdoor view was Lafayette Park, the White House and the Washington Monument.
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.
