New Favorites.

Well....  It's been a while.  Such is life, I guess.

But.

I have a new favorite "camera" - the quotation marks are because it's both ridiculously remarkable and ridiculously lame that the "camera" is my iPhone.  Using the Hipstamatic app.

Haters are gonna hate - so go ahead if you feel the need.  Otherwise, I rather like these.


The first three are from the Manatee Viewing Center at the FPL power plant in Apollo Beach:

Random dinner photos @ Macaroni Grill with my daughter:

South Jetty at Venice, Florida on a cold, windy day:

 (My daughter took this one....)

An interesting 36 hours or so - the fog was amazing for a couple of days:

Five Years of Octobers.

October is an interesting month to me.....  The weather in Florida finally begins to release its brutal grip on us a bit.  There has been post-season baseball here two of the past three years.  Halloween lurks at the end of the month with the promise of candy and ghouls.

But October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month and for the past six years, my family has been an active participant in the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer event in Tampa.

So rather than post a bunch of pink themed photos, various themes on ribbons or even a classy collection of art nudes - I thought I'd go a different direction....

The photos that I've chosen all have one simple thing in common.  They were all taken during the MSABC walk along Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa over five years worth of events.  

I have no doubt that I'll be dragging a bunch of cameras with me on the walk again this year...

Lightning Crashes.

June 2009.

I'm fascinated by the lightning storms we have here in Florida.  There can be incredible displays of nature's fireworks for an hour and there may be no rain at all.  Other times, you're in a downpour appropriate for the Old Testament and you can barely see the lightning strikes.  Of course, if we're lucky - we avoid the hurricanes of category 2 and above.....

But this was just a night.  A random June night.  Probably a Wednesday, as I'm guessing that I drove home watching this display (as happens often in the summer along I-75) and then I became motivated to try to capture "lightning in a bottle" (so to speak) once again.  

Yes, this means that there is an earlier set of lightning photos.....  I'll dig those up soon enough, I suspect.

The big difference between this set and the earlier attempts?  Pure luck.

These were shot on the front balcony of my place using a tripod, my Canon G7, 30 second exposures and a healthy dose of karma.....


The other big difference?  


I didn't edit these photos.  They are straight off of the camera.  So...  Yes.  You can do a lot with a camera that doesn't have interchangeable lenses and a zillion settings.

And yes.  This time I ripped off the title of a song that's less great from a band that is certainly less great.  But the song is still pretty good.... 

All that aside....  The curls and loops in the lightning in these photos are amazing.  At least to me.


E.

The Downtown Lights.

December 2009.

It was just a typical Wednesday, actually.  I had driven up to Tampa to spend the evening with my daughter and was driving home on the Crosstown Expressway - where I found myself paying more attention to the low cloud cover hovering over Downtown Tampa.....

So I took the next exit, turned around and looked for the first free parking deck I could find.

Once I was up there, my attention was split between the lights in the clouds, the nighttime traffic and the utter bleakness of the parking structure.  I used the Holgas (plural, as one is loaded with color and one black and white) for a couple of photos of the structure.  (They are the square photos, btw.)

The Holga exposures were done by holding the cameras on a low wall and manually holding the shutter open for about 10 seconds (I think) - the rest of the images were on my Canon G7 which was also stabilized by low walls and exposures in the 1 second range.  Yes.  I should keep a tripod in the truck.  With the exception of the conversion of one G7 photo to black & white (I like the coldness of it in B&W better), none of the images have been modified in any way.

Sometimes it's a good idea to stop and smell the roses.  Or to quote the famous philosopher Ferris Bueller - "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it..." 

E.

(And yes....  I shameless ripped of the title of this post from a great song from a great band that you've never heard of....)

Holga, B&W - C41 Process

Holga - Color

When Things Changed.

Key West.  June 2004.

A very short return to Key West with someone important to me both personally and as a photographer.  We ran around like idiots with cameras for a couple of days.  I used my DSLR, she used her 35mm and threw random filters on the lenses that were on sale.  Both approaches were pretty great.  Almost immediately upon returning to Key West, I realized that how I looked at things in terms of how I'd take a picture had changed.  For the better, I hope.

As much as it might seem that I go down to Key West all the time to take photos, it would be over five years before I returned after this trip.....


A couple of these photos (the cemetery cat, the cemetery water well and the house with the funky wall) were buried on my hard drive until tonight.  All of the cemetery photos were shot through the fence - we were too late to walk through.  And the photo of the Afterdeck sign is still one of my all time favorite photos of anything.  


I included both the original camera image and the tarted up one that I've used for years of the broken angel statue.  I think I prefer the original now.  We'll chalk that up to evolving tastes....


And the photo of the girl?  Well.  I had forgotten that existed until tonight.  So I'm including it for purposes of nostalgia.  


I think I'll start jumping around a bit more in terms of chronology now.  I hope you enjoyed the ride so far....


E.