Wow, it’s been a while since I blogged. I’m going to try to catch up in this post, going from the most recent events back to where I left off.
From the most recent
Last Sunday my friend Randy and his brother Steve took me to the Buccaneers vs Cardinals football game. They had an extra ticket and they generously offered me to go for free :) I took the opportunity to work on my new shooting technique (which is shooting in Manual exposure mode, which I will comment on a little later). I grabbed my Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens and headed to the Raymond James stadium. It never crossed my mind that I may have trouble getting this lens past the security checkpoint. The guy who was checking the bags by the stadium entrance pulled me over and said “This thing is too big, I don’t know if I can let you in with it…Let me check with my supervisor” So he called another guy who then called another guy who then asked me “Does this thing extend any further?” And I must say, with the hood on, the 70-200VR looks quite long :) I said “No sir, this is as far as it goes” :) after which he waved me in.
Even though our seats were quite close to the field (row H, which is like… 8th row from the field), because we were sitting by the end zone, I realized that 200mm wasn’t offering me enough reach to shoot midfield and you can absolutely forget about it if the action was on the opposite end. But I managed to snap few interesting shots anyways. Here is one of my favorites:
The entire gallery of that game can be viewed here: Buccaneers vs Cardinals
Unfortunately, most of the action took place on the other side of the field, and not being so much into the game I was “stuck” with… taking pictures of Tampa Bay Buccaneers Cheerleaders :) It actually happened to be a challenging task I must say. In some cases the girls would either have some dudes on the background (photographers, security staff, etc) while in others I wouldn’t be able to compose a good shot b-cs some fan’s heads would get in a way. Finally, nailing down exposure turned out to be a bit tricky too - because the light was very harsh (early afternoon sun) it was resulting in strong highlights on girls faces. Bright white stripes painted on the grass were not helping either - they were creating quite distracting background which confused the heck out of my D70’s matrix metering. Eventually, I decided to spot meter off of girls faces and ran with that (which turned out to be a winning strategy). I locked my aperture on f/4 (to be on the safe side, making sure I was getting more than just their eyes and noses in focus ;-) and shutter speed was usually floating around 1/2500 (plus/minus third of a stop)
I must say, I was really “sweating” the shooting conditions… Constant doubts were attacking me - am I being too agressive with the highlights, should I back out exposure a lil bit, may be go by the matrix metering and preserve as much highlights as I can? But that will result in heavy postprocessing with a lot of curving later on… so, I was literally “sweating” it :) By the very end, I got a bit frustrated, I thought nothing was going to come out of my “Manual” approach. So when the game was over, I came closer to the field, and just in case my “fooling around on M” was not going to deliver any decent results, I flipped into Aperture Priority and snapped few pics of every girl.. just in case…
When I got home and sorted thru the material I was stunned. All my work in “Manual” resulted in perfect exposure! I simply nailed it. No postprocessing was needed. And the only pictures that didn’t make the cut were… the ones I took in the end, using Aperture Priority - they were a bit too dark and required “curving”…
Anyways, here is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Cheerleaders pictures gallery
One week ago
We attended Guavaween celebration down in Ybor City. To our surprise, it went pretty well. We got there about 20 mins before the night parade began. Parking wasn’t a problem at all (although did cost $20), getting inside was another $15/person but everything was quite well organized. Police was everywhere, we haven’t seen any “misbehaving” drunks and overall, had a lot of fun!
The entire gallery can be view here: Ybor City Guavaween Pictures
Two weeks ago
Attended AirFest in St. Petersburg. My friend Dennis told me about this event, but because their web site looked kinda boring I decided I wasn’t going to go. But then later on, as Nadia and I were sitting at Panera bread on Saturday afternoon and trying to come up with what we were going to do for the rest of the day, I decided to give it a shot. And so we rushed down to St. Pete, and were quite surprised with how many various activities were going on there besides the airshow itself…
The entire picture gallery can be viewed here: St. Petersburg AirFest Pictures
Three weeks ago
Denis and I went on a photo safari to Ybor city and Tampa downtown. To our surprise it went quite well, we’ve come out with few decent shots, but my favorite still was this one, when we fooled around in the end with a cigar we picked up at Ybor for exactly this purpose :)
The Ybor City/Tampa picture gallery is here
Four weeks ago
Trip to new York.. boy, there is no way I can even begin to describe it :) I’ll just say that the pictures are here and that will have to do it :)
New York City Pictures gallery
Finally
And finally, my DELL Vostro 1400 has been working flawlessly ever since I got it. I’m very happy with my purchase, it’s a relatively light, very mobile laptop with extremely bright LCD screen and long battery life (I consistently get 6 hours on this 9-cell battery).
