New Skills

I've been wanting to grow my shooting skills for quite some time now but have not budgeted time to do so. For all my working years, outdoor shooting was done for the cleanliness of the shots with flash fill. Truthfully, I was/am able to shoot outdoors with flash, in my sleep. It's second nature. Now that there's more time in my life, I very much want to master available light exposures so that they too will become second nature.

Living in Ponte Vedra Beach and being so close to St. Augustine will afford me the opportunity to grow and explore as much as I want. I'm looking forward to it.

The first roadblock that I encountered is the balancing of background lighting conditions with the subject back lighting condition. I've very quickly learned that in order to have a great shot, the background has to be at least the same exposure as the foreground. I've found that darker backgrounds work best--although I'm not sure how this will work on the beach--which is my next step. For this shot, I used my new Canon 70-200 f.28. I set my iso at 400, guestimated the exposure to be 125@f.5.6. I got lucky. The shot worked.

Ponte Vedra Beach Based Photographer

Remember Rodney Dangerfield in the movie "Easy Money" Well, he never photographed Buddy!!!

It's great being a Ponte Vedra Beach, Fl phtotographer

Ponte Vedra Beach Energizing the Creative Side

I've been bored to tears over the past two years with the shooting end of my work. My professional growth was tilted toward the production end of assignments.

The idea of keeping the technical side of the work simple, neat and clean is still where I want to be but I wanted that "something else" in my shots. This shot shows that for me, I've found it...

Still preaching and using the most simple lighting, I took the strobe off of my camera and put it on a light stand either to my right or to my left. I triggered the light with a simple electronic radio unit. I'm thrilled with the results! The stationary strobe gave me the freedom to move around while keeping a constant exposure. While still using the indirect lighting techniques that I've loved using for so many years, now seems to look even richer. I'm looking forward to this coming weekend's assignment.

Living in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fl for the past two or so months has not only helped me free up my thinking but it's also helped me lower my blood pressure from 138/80 to an amazing 103/80. Wow, professional growth and more relaxed arteries.