Most of you know that in addition to photographing portraits & lifestyle images, I also love to get out there & capture the world around me. A few months ago I started doing weekly "Field Trips" with my dear friend & photographer, Iris. We pick a local place and see where it takes us. We have the best time!!
Just a bit of what we've photographed...
- A historic 1938 State Farmer's Market in Pompano, soon to be demolished :(
- My first beach sunrise in Deerfield
- A Japanese teahouse at Morikami
- A field of vibrant sunflowers in Boynton (on a Closed day...saying "please" gets you far)
- A historic school house in Fort Lauderdale (again...saying "please")
- And a few weeks ago I shot my first alligator (not literally!). I even managed to get the reflection of me standing on the dock above him!! How cool is that?!
We wandered into the main building to get permission to photograph the carousel & found to my
pop-culture, geekish delight...an original B9 robot from the TV series "Lost in Space." (You know..."Danger Will Robinson, danger!" (my Instagram photo) What a fantastic jolt of childhood! If you get the chance, take the kids to the Explorium...they also have an R2D2 and Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet.
We made our way to the carousel and photographed almost every angle possible. But, on the way out, next to the 2-story play structure...were about a dozen spider webs dancing above our heads in the early morning sun. Just gorgeous!!
My Sony a77 has this amazing feature called "Peaking Levels". This allows me to clearly see what detail is in focus. I was shown this game-changing focusing featuring when I was in Seattle.
(HUGE "Thank You" to Drew Temple from Sony for showing me this!)
If you've ever tried to nail a spider web and managed to get details...congrats! I....on the other hand....have struggled with it. Even on manual focus. I don't know if Nikon or Canon has this, but this Sony feature is so freakin' cool.
The incredible detail of these spider webs was captured courtesy of Sony's Peaking Levels feature. Even cropped, I am blown away by the detail!!!! I included the screen shots of my crops. (You "math guys" can figure out those percentages for me! ;)
Get out on your own Field Trip this weekend & photograph!
Enjoy!
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| I was standing 20+ ft. below this using my 75-300mm/4.5 (zoom was at 150mm). Wind was blowing!! I cropped about 30% out of the original frame. (See below.) |
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| This is a detail of the shot above. This was then cropped a crazy amount again to see this detail. (See the crop below.) |
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| I might need to bring this one out again around Halloween! |
