Skip to main content

Cherry Blossoms


Spring has finally arrived in Washington, DC with the blooming of the Cherry Blossoms.  The first day of peak bloom was April 10th this year which is a lot later then the past couple years when peak bloom was the last couple days of March and the first two days of April.  I went down to the tidal basin early in the morning (before 9:00 AM which is when the museums open and all the tour buses unload for the day) to beat the crowds. I glad I did because it wasn't tree to tree people (no walls) holding cameras, phones, or iPads trying to capture that perfect picture. Instead it was small photography groups, other early morning photographers and senior citizens walking their dogs; thus I could actually casually walk along the basin in peace. 

I shot the basin with an 18-200mm lens; while I had my macro lens I didn’t use it. I used a 100 ISO at an aperture set mostly to f8.0 or f9.0; I did bump it up to f16 and f20 for a few wide shots. My shutter speed varied depending on the light, since there were a significant number of shaded areas and I was shooting towards the sun on occasion.  I also brought a medium density graduated neutral density filter which I used to get the lovely tree and monument shot below.  I did post process the images in Lightroom.  You can see all the lovely images here. 




Labels:
Location: Tidal Basin, Washington, DC 20024, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2025

This year felt a little off for me; I think it was because I was in a mental recovery mode.  I finished my graduate program in June and immediately went on a week-long vacation to Palm Springs.  I do not recommend Palm Springs in June; way too hot.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the graduate program mentally and physically exhausted me, which I think showed in some of my creative work.  But being able to work with great people like Natalie Hanrion , Coralinx Cosplay , and Anastasia B kept me motivated.  While I didn’t attend as many Cosplay Photo Shoot events as in the past, the ones I did attend were helpful in keeping the creativity flowing.  I also took some time this year to reflect on a few things and will be making some changes for 2025. In 2024, I shot 6241 frames, which is a 30-percent decrease from last year.  I edited 3187 frames, which is a 40-percent decrease from 2023.  I think this year, I started focusing on being very min...
Post a Comment
Read more

Whispering Waters

On July 19th, I drove up to Poughkeepsie, NY to attend the Whispers of Waterhouse photo event held by Everlore Events . This was an all-day event, which included a light lunch, vendors, arts, and crafts areas, and three different styled shooting locations.  I was one of the roaming photographers for this event, which means you work with models who are not currently working with a featured photographer (who have schedules), and can wander between all three shooting locations at your convenience.  For this event I used: Canon R6 1 Speed light Trigger Umbrella Gels 24 - 105mm lens Camera Settings: This was an outside shoot that had sets in heavy forested areas, out on a pond, and sunny meadows; thus, I was adjusting the settings to the lighting conditions.  I used ISO 100 and 400.  My goal was to keep my aperture around f/4 to achieve a nice background blur; however, depending on the conditions, I had to stop down to f/9 and f/11 to manage the light...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Optical Spot

The weekend of November 16 th , I got a little ambitious and did four sessions to test out the Lindsey Adler Optical Spot .     I originally rented the optical spot from LensRentals , but that session had to be rescheduled; however, I didn’t want the rental to go to waste, thus a TFP weekend. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 2 FJ400 Westcott Strobes 1 Optical Spot 2 strip boxes 1 bell reflector grids 2 C-stands 2 light stands Sandbags Backdrop stand Savage Fashion Grey Seamless Gobos Gels Spyder Color Checker Card A-clamps Star filter Red Curtains Posing stool     The set up While I did four shoots in one weekend, the lighting setup was basically the same for all four sessions; what changed was the gels and the gobos.  I started with a fashion grey seam...
Post a Comment
Read more