Exposure assignment 5

This weeks assignment in my Exposure class was to use different techniques to imply motion. I headed out this morning looking for some flowers to shoot and spent about 2 hours driving around before I finally ended up at the Botanical Gardens.

The different techniques we were to use were the Zoom technique, the Monet/camera shake, spinning, and then a Bryan Peterson specialty - fake rain!

Here are some of the shots I got for the assignment. I didn't nail them like I had wanted too, but I'll go back and re-shoot all of these at some point until I get exactly what I want! ;)

(Click on photo to see full sized image on Flickr)

Silhouettes and things

I needed to spend some time on my week 3 assignment for the Exposure class. This week we were supposed to shoot silhouettes and the "who cares" aperture. Since it was a beautiful day out, I convinced my wife Tara to head to Honeymoon Island with me to try to get some fun silhouettes.

It was a gorgeous sunset and I got to try a bunch of different things with the camera - both with and without Cokin filters. I think I got a couple of shots I can use for the class (though I'm still not happy with the "who cares" aperture shots).

(Click on photo to see full size image on Flickr)

Thumbs Up!

The Ford Ironman triathalon series hit Clearwater this morning for the Ford Ironman 70.3 World Championship 2007. I checked out the route and realized that the cycling stage went about 8 blocks from my house so I got up early this morning, packed some gear, and with my cup of coffee to go, I headed over to the course.

For those of you unfamiliar with triathalons, they start with a 1.2 mile swim, followed by a 56 mile bike ride, and finish up with a 13.1 mile run. These people are INSANE!!! I positioned myself about 4 miles into the cycling stage, on the downslope of a rather decent sized hill (decent sized for Florida anyways). My thinking was to try to do some panning shots while they were travelling at 45MPH and even faster. Wow, what a challenge that was.

Unfortunately, I only brought two SD cards with me, each holding about 250 shots. I filled those up in under 45 minutes - boy scout I'm not! Since I couldn't take any more photos, I waited for a break in the action, and headed back home to see what I ended up with. Over 300 photos were throw-aways, but I had about 150 shots that I ended up keeping. Here are some of the better ones.

(Click on photo to see full sized image on Flickr)

What are you looking at?

This morning at 10AM they announced the winners of the Boyd Hill Photo contest. My mom had entered a couple of photo's so we decided to go down to Fort DeSoto at sunrise and get see what we could find and then head over to Boyd Hill to see who the big winners were.

Normally a hot spot for birds, Fort DeSoto was far from hopping this morning as it was high tide and quite windy. Regardles, we stumbled around for about 90 minutes and I was able to get some photo's for my Exposure class. At 9:30, it was time to head over to Boyd Hill!

Unfortunately, the competition was stiff this year and my mom did get any ribbons. My good friend Robert managed to take home a 3rd place and an honorable mention however. Add these two ribbons to the four he received last year and he's doing pretty good in this contest!

(Click on photo to see full sized image on Flickr)

The chair ;)

Yeah, I suspect the chair probably get's lost in all of this doesn't it? I needed a photo of myself and asked my friend Amy if she would like to be the photographer. She jumped at the opportunity and came up with the idea to bring this chair I have in my office to the Clearwater Causeway after work one night.

We *bothered* our friend Jenny to come along - as you can tell from the pictures, we really had to twist her arm. I wasn't sure how the shots were going to come out when viewing them on the small LCD on my camera, but once I got them on the computer and ran them through Photoshop, I was really happy with the results!

(Click on photo to see full size image on Flickr)