Yesterday I began photographing selected local churches for a calendar the non-profit organization I work for does each year. This is my third year doing the calendar photos and the second year of having supporting churches as the theme. I usually photograph a little over 20 churches to cover the 12 months and then smaller photos on the inside and back of the covers.
I’d travelled to photograph the raptors at the Carolina Raptor Center with a very conservative camera gear kit — my Nikon D700 with a AF-S 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 G VRII lens mounted and a 24-70mm f/2.8 G ED lens in a bag as a secondary choice. That was everything, and the 24-70mm lens never left the bag. I call this my lets see what’s going on camera kit.
A change up today from posting autumn photos — this image of backlit Brazilian Agate. It appears this site is back to normal server resource usage since the “80legs” bot/web-crawler was blocked. Where it had been requiring between 4-6 hours of sever CPU processing time a day it’s now requiring less then an hour — I guess they’re going to let us stay. :-)
In past years my eyes and brain have accepted a 3:2 aspect ratio for photos is “normal” – whatever that means. But here of late, shooting with my Canon S90 and now my Olympus E-M5, I’ve been shooting at a 4:3 aspect, often composing with a 3:2 finished product in mind, so as to use all of the smaller sensor — then cropping the images to 3:2 during post-processing.
It’s interesting shooting a scene along side another photographer whose work you respect. It provides an opportunity to see through another’s eyes — through their vision and their interpretations.
We escaped to the cloudy, foggy, misty, rainy, sunny North Carolina mountains this weekend with friends. On Saturday it was one of those days where if you didn’t like the current weather you need only wait a little while or drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway a piece for it to change. The day began early with a mountain vigil for a sunrise which never broke through the clouds…