After the adventure in the snow out on the coast, I ran into a little tripod trouble, and had to send my legs back to New Jersey for service. Since it's been beaten into me that, as a landscape shooter, All Photos Are Better Taken From A Tripod, I felt a bit at sea without my legs. I tried to 'knit' a new tripod from bits and pieces of two older, @#$%ier sets of Amvona legs, but then couldn't get my ballhead off the center post. But the sun was out, and stuff was poppin' over at Bellevue Botanical Gardens.
I am constantly reminding myself how lucky I am to have a world-class botanical garden within five minutes of home...I know the name of maybe one out of every 50 items that are cultivated there, but for a photographer, it's an incredible place to practice working with light and to see a landscape—even a manmade one—change through the seasons.
Spring is, as may be surmised from previous posts, running late this year in the Pacific Northwest...it was almost May, and the daffs were still up and fresh-looking. So, slightly bereft without tripod, yet still needing to capture something, I decided it would be a good time to practice my hand-held shooting. I loaded up my 4XL photo-vest (a vast thing, capable of smuggling an ultra-compact car in its various cavernous pockets) with the essentials, and drove over to the gardens. Turns out 'essentials' did not include memory cards, as I forgot the wallet and had just the 1-gig card in the camera.
That turned out OK: I found that shooting hand-held made adjusting compositions easier, and more spontaneous, which in turn encouraged faster shooting: knowing I only had 95-110 shots available, however, persuaded me to slow things back down and compose with care. It all balanced out, and I had a great hour and a half, and got some fine images, including these bashful backlit daffs.
I went back the next week, early on a Monday morning (my flex day), and shot most of four 1-gig cards in about the same amount of time. Have yet to process those images but, based on what I'd learned this day, I was able to really concentrate on using the morning light and DOF, so I'm looking forward to see what came of it all. The next day, of course, my tripod arrived from NJ, and the weather and my free time have been uncoordinated since. As a result, I haven't had a chance to play with the new set of Kenko extension tubes I purchased for close-up work.
Showing posts with label backlighting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label backlighting. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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