Project 365 - March 8, 2015

Playing with a Lens

Every once in a while, I borrow a lens to see what it is like and how it is different from the ones I own.  This lens is a 50 mm Nikkor lens.  It is a manual focus, which provides a challenge, but that is okay.  I like a challenge.

So naturally, I use whatever subjects are available to me.  Today, it was Newton!  Or Noot as my daughter now likes to call him!!

Noot is a great subject since all he does all day is eat and sleep!  He was lazily napping on our dining room table.  Lots of natural lighting for me to play with.  This was taken on manual everything at 400 ISO and 2.8 aperture.  I love the amount of detail in the fur and the whiskers.

Then I decided to step outside and see what my flowers would look like with this lens.

I love the shallow depth of field.  I think I moved the aperture to 2.0 here.  I sat on the ground and focused by moving my body closer or further away to get just the one flower in focus.  The colors are a bit weird on the leaves.  Not sure why they look purple.  

 Then I took the last photo of this new marigold that just started to grow at the base of my avocado plant.  Supposedly the marigolds keep spiders away.  So far, no, but I keep trying!!

So a short lesson on photography today.  Best to just pick up the camera and use it!  It has been a long time.

Project 365 - January 14, 2015

A Little Leftover Christmas

I haven't visited this blog in a very long time.  But I was outside doing my wandering thing with my camera.  As I walked out the front door, I immediately giggled when I saw that Joel and I had forgotten to remove the penguins!  Yes, there is a bit of Christmas still at the Hills of Inverrary!

I guess these guys just got away from us!  So perhaps we will leave them out a little longer!!  No one has said anything.  Usually we get a letter if we do something against the condo rules.  But not this time.  Maybe these are nondenominational penguins!!

I kept walking.  I have a usual pattern, where I walk between two homes across the street and then down near the lake.  There I usually find some birds or bugs that capture my attention.

I like when the sun is setting. It is much more challenging to take the photos in a darkening situation. So these birds were flying by me and I played with the settings and tried to capture them the best that I could.I love the colors of the reflections.  

And then there are these birds.  Someday I will look up the species.  Until I do, I will just continue to call them the "monkey birds" because they sound like the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz!  I love when the sun illuminates their perch and especially their beaks.  The bright orange certainly stands out in nature!!  I could watch these guys for hours.

And then, of course, I always looks for something in bloom.  This was in front of Jackie Gleason's former residence.  There were so many of these flowers blooming on this tree.  This was the last of my light.  So after I snapped this one, I headed back to the house.  I really haven't done much of this type of photography lately since I took up running 5K races. I always feel like have to keep moving and not with a camera in my hand.  But this day, I just made the time.

Project 365 - December 8, 2013

What I Find on the Corner

I never know what I will see when I am driving.  I know that I am in a place where surprises exists on each street corner in major urban areas.  However, I don't always expect to see these surprises as I am driving in the western areas of Broward County, typically called a bedroom community by our urban planners.

But as I stopped for a red light on Friday, when I was really in a grand rush to get somewhere, I had no choice but stop and wait for the light to turn green at the corner of University Dr. and Oakland Park Blvd. because there is one of those Red Light Cameras that would welcome the image of my license plate in order to immediately transport the information to the City of Sunrise so that within about five days there would be one of those envelopes in my mailbox, you know the type, fold here and here and here and then tear off those little strips of paper so that you can open up the flaps of paper to find, yes, to find that violation that costs a lot of money.  So, yes, I stopped and took a deep breath, turned to my left and saw this person.

Ok, so there are homeless people on every corner in downtown Fort Lauderdale.  I am used to that.  In fact, I am so oblivious to the vast numbers of homeless people that I don't even pay attention much.  Please, don't call me callous, I do feel badly for the newly homeless, the people who really need a helping hand.  There are agencies throughout the country that are available to assist these folks.  There are social service organizations, faith-based organizations and more.  These folks are the ones that want assistance and when the hand is extended the hand is usually accepted.  But then there are the folks that are emotionally and mentally incapable of helping themselves or to recognize that help is available and they just aimlessly move through our streets, almost like ghosts in the daylight.  I feel for these folks as well, but as soon as they are helped, the vast majority are back on the streets because they have trouble with reality and our social system really doesn't' have a good method of sustaining this type of assistance.  But then there are the folks that truly do not want the help.  These are folks that I see in the building where I work.  I recognize their faces.  They just don't want help and they are capable of understanding that there is help.  They just choose to continue this lifestyle.    I have always said that there are three, and perhaps more, levels of homelessness.

But on Friday, I was sure that this person did not fit into any of these homeless categories.  This was someone who had a message to share with the world.  So of course, I grabbed my phone, didn't have the DSLR camera at the time, and snapped as many images that I could until the light turned green.  I wasn't  sure of the quality or if I had even captured what I was seeing.

Not only was he carrying a puppet of some sort so it looked as though he could break out into ventriloquism at any given moment, but also carried this huge sign on his back and an umbrella for shade since it was a typical sunny and hot afternoon in South Florida.

Later in the day when I was showing these to Rachel, we tried to read the sign and make some sense of it.  Not sure that there is a point, but nonetheless, I found this to be one of my more interesting characters.

Project 365 - October 19, 2013

Gold Coast Railway Museum

The Level IV Photographers took a field trip to the Gold Coast Railway Museum.  I would have carpooled with someone, but since I needed to be somewhere with my family at 7 pm, I figured I better drive by myself.  So I situated myself with my phone plugged in, with Google Maps navigating the way, my Beatles tunes blaring and a bottle of water for the road.  Good thing for that bottle of water.  It was so hot and humid at the musuem, I went through two bottles and poured another over my head to keep cool!

The museum has been there since right after World War II.  Originally there were dirigibles in a huge hanger there -- six of them -- that would fly over the ocean seeking U-boats.  It makes you think . . . it wasn't all that long ago when that war took place.  True, it was before I was born, but only 10 years before I was born. Not really ancient history.

But then it was turned into a museum of rail cars.  There were streamlined cars from the 1940s and a fancy schmancy one that was used by many of our presidents, including Truman when he held up the newspaper that announced that Dewey won!!  There were cabooses and military hospital cars.  And, you could walk into most of them.

I was most intrigued by the remnants of buildings against the color of the sky.  I have another series of black and whites images but I am saving them for a potential exhibition.

Photo of the Day - October 13, 2013 - Part II

After Class . . .

Instead of jumping into my car and rushing home . . . I still had about a half an hour to myself . . . so I wandered down toward the water and a very small park, I believe we call them pocket parks.  I had always intended to stop here to shoot but was always heading somewhere. 

This was not the ideal time of day to shoot because the sun was in the wrong place.  Yes, the photographer is always seeking the source of light.  But these are images that I made so I am sharing them.

Photo of the Day - October 13, 2013

Another Beginning

On Saturday I started another photography class.  It has been quite a long time since I have been in class, but I felt like I needed a refresher and some inspiration.  Of course the first class was not photography, instead it was a three hour lesson in Photoshop.  Still, it was inspiring to be around other photographers and see their different levels of expertise and confidence.  I was quiet and listened a lot.  We spent three hours working on a photo, and we all worked on the same photo.  I did learn new techniques with layers.  The trick is to think in 3D.

I am posting both the before and after images here for your comments!

Photo of the Day - August 1, 2013

A Walk About

Since we had dinner so early tonight and the sun was still way up in the sky, I decided to take a walk.  It is still the middle of the summer here and oh so very hot, even at 7 p.m.  Even in a pair of shorts and tank top, I was sweating by the time I crossed the street.  

Yes, I know, I know, it is South Florida, it is the subtripics and yes, I know I run 2 miles in this heat, but when I am trying to take photos and standing still, it is oh so uncomfortable.

That's why I always head down to the lake first.  Someone left their sprinklers on too long and I had to slosh through really soggy grass.  That is when I found the lizard staring at me.  Then I wandered behind some of the homes along the lake to see what I might find.  I really never know what might surprise me . . . hopefully not another alligator like last year!!

I found some interesting mold growing on a stump of a tree.  I liked the texture and the colors and with a bit of Photoshop I was able to get some depth.

Then I followed the birds.  I love these birds, and I have been taking images of them for years.  I never get tired of watching them fly low across the lake making very cool trails along the water to carry food back to their nests.  And then their sounds are so very loud.  My girls and I call them the monkey birds because that is what they sound like.

Then I found this lovely rusty lock wrapped around the trunk of a tree.  I saw two guys walking along the edge of the lake and I knew they were looking at me.  I figured if I ignored them they would go away.  But, no luck.  They struck up a conversation with me and that is where I lost my light.

It was a very nice conversation but a very short photo shoot.  Oh well.  There is always tomorrow!