Yeah, I know. I keep shooting at this place, even though there's not a ton to shoot there. But it's fairly close to me, as opposed to the 55 minute ride to the much more expansive Florida Botanical Gardens in Largo. This day I found even less to shoot than usual, and only got seven shots worth sharing.
Not my best shooting day. The problem with shooting horse races is that they run only one each 30 minutes. In a football or basketball game, the next play comes much sooner, and you have more chances to get shots. I shot these with my "Bigma" lens, the 50-500mm Sigma.
I had to drive into Tampa for what turned out to be no reason Sunday afternoon. I thought to bring my camera and stopped in Ybor City on my way home to snap some shots. I got there around 5 p.m. and shot only a few dozen photos.
The guitar player told me he didn't want to be photographed but said it was OK for me to shoot his guitar. That's why no face shots of him. I couldn't choose between the two shots here. The first one shows the lines on the sheet music but the second one is better framed.
And, yes, the train was coming. I wish I had stayed in place for two seconds longer. I would have gotten a better shot but it was probably wise for me to bail out while the train was plenty far away. I can just see cutting it too close, losing my balance and dying for a silly photograph that no one would see anyway.
I also could not decide which of the pizza restaurant shots to include. The second one I brightened the shadowed portion of the frame but I don't know whether that improves the image or not. So I put them both in so you could decide.
It was $5 day at Lowry Park Zoo but temperatures in the 30s (yes, Fahrenheit!) kept the usually massive crowds away despite the discounted price. I went with several other brave (? -- you may have another adjective in mind) members of the Brandon-Riverview Photography Group.
Some of the animals were out but many had more sense than we did. I had my 2x magnifying extender on, which means that I had to manually focus all of the shots while wearing two gloves on my left hand because auto focus doesn't work with my extender. Photo below by Roger Moran.
That's not to make excuses for the lack of brilliance. Just sayin'.
I also think that I need to quit being lazy and use my tripod to get better focus on some of my shots. Handheld is adequate for posting on a blog but for print quality photos, I need to take the time to set the camera on something solid.
You'll see plenty of them if you go to Tampa's Lettuce Lake Park in August. They were close enough to photograph but not too close for comfort. At least not too close for my comfort. Others might think just looking at pictures of spiders is too close!
I forgot to bring my tripod, which I regretted. A lot of these would have turned out much better if they had been steadier shots. Live and learn.
These are photos from last year's Scott Kelby Worldwide PhotoWalk in Safety Harbor. August 24, 2008, to be precise. I post them here for the benefit of members of the Riverview Digital Photography Meetup Group as we look for places to shoot.
I drove through intermittent rain to get to the town then walked several blocks down Main Street through a steady downpour to the meeting place. But I made it. Luckily for the 50 or so people gathered under the gazebo at John Wilson Park the rain stopped before we set off to document Safety Harbor.
I had an idea in my head that there would be some guidance involved but the only instructions we got were to meet at Crispers restaurant at 7 p.m., that whining was not allowed and to take care not to get hit by a car.
The restaurant is a good place to meet afterward. It is large enough to accommodate a group and people could fire up their laptops and share their results if they wanted.
A few months earlier I joined several thousand other price-conscious people when I visited Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa on a $5 admission day. Below are some of the results.
Ybor, yet again! I signed up for an event called the Worldwide Photowalk. Scott Kelby, a photographer who writes digital photography and Photoshop books, hatched the idea as a book promotion. A bunch of photographers would meet someplace, roam around snapping shots of it for a couple of hours and meet at a restaurant afterward for either lunch or dinner, depending on whether it was a morning or afternoon walk.
It now includes 24,000 camera toters in events around the world.
I had gone to one last year in Safety Harbor. We got rained on but the overcast skies made the light ideal. This year I chose Ybor simply because it was the one closest to my home. As the day approached I wondered if I'd want to shoot there again, especially in a Florida July mid afternoon.
Usually I've started shooting at Centro Ybor, the hub of Tampa's party town, and branched east or west from there. So today I started at what is normally the easternmost spot, the venerable Columbia restaurant at 7th Ave. and 21st St., then ventured south then east from there.
Here are a few of the vertically oriented shots.
The shots of the walkway framed on the right with brick arches was a place I had stopped to get a bottle of Gatorade because I had forgotten to pack a cooler with drinks. That sun will sap your energy fast if you don't stay hydrated. I walked outside, looked to my left and said, "Wow!"
Good photos are often right in front of you, if you're willing to notice them. My apparent fixation with railroad tracks continues. And, like last time, a shot of a padlock made the best-of batch. What would Freud say?
Now some of the landscape oriented photos:
I don't know if some of the painting on the wall is graffiti or used to be intentional decoration or is some combination of the two with some mold added for panache.
The green shot is the underside of an umbrella in Centro Ybor where I sat as I drained the rest of my Gatorade. There's a lot of color in Ybor City. Some weirdness too. Like the guy lining up those giant pipes on the counter of a hookah bar. I'm not sure what they smoke in those things in a public bar, if they're indeed smoked on the premises.
This was another photo walk with fellow members of the Riverview Photography Meetup Group. I've shot in Ybor City numerous times, with models and without, so it gets more challenging to find things I haven't seen and shot before.
When you get there early in the morning, the only people you're likely to meet are either photographers or people sleeping off the night before. I felt a little uneasy shooting the bums on the benches.
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