Isla Mujeres, Mexico

Isla Mujeres has some beautiful sunsets. There are several keys points that I try to follow when I photograph the sunset:

• Don't center the horizon. Either the sky has great colouring and interesting clouds, or the ground takes on interesting hues because of the waning sun changing the light reflecting off it. Whichever is more interesting, make that 2/3 of the picture.
• Vertical orientation of the photo makes it more dramatic.
• Horizontal orientation of the photo makes it more serene and stable.
• Put the sun in the extreme corners or just outside of the photo. The sun is a really hot subject and will blow out everything around. If you want the sun in the shot, use a silhouette and put the sun behind something.
• The sunset colours will continue past the sun dropping below the horizon. So many photographers leave when the sun disappears. Stick around, wait for it to get dark.
• Towards the sun is not the only direction you should look in. Turn around. Sometimes what is behind you and reflecting the sunset colours will be just as picturesque.
• Focus to infinity. The light will change incredibly fast. If you set the focus beforehand, you have one less thing to wait for. You can just bang out composition after composition with varying orientations.
• Backlit and silhouette shots are great during sunsets. Sunsets are all about colours from the sky and shapes (of the clouds, objects between you and the horizon, 'scapes on the horizon). You cannot get anything further than the sun, so use those shapes to make your photo interesting.

When I took this picture, I was thinking of the quintessential vacation picture. Sunset, ocean, beach, exactly two people, palm trees, etc. Isla Mujeres ("Island of Women") is an amazing place.

Temple of the Warriors at Chitzen Itza, Mexico

Such an impressive structure. The Temple of the Warriors at Chitzen Itza in Mexico has 200 hundred columns surrounding it. I am not sure what each represents, but they stand resolute around their temple. When I first read about this site, I wanted to capture the feeling of standing amongst the columns. To almost reach out and touch the smoothness of the stone after so many years have passed (over 1000). In the background, you can see the actual Temple of the Warriors towering above the columns.

I knew that I wanted the depth of field to contain some of the columns close to me to be in focus. I did not want the ones closest to me in focus, nor did I want to totally blur out the ones in the distance. Lining up the columns so that they created a nice, clean diagonal off into the distance was also critical. The sun, luckily enough, was in a great position to give shadows of the columns cleanly across the ground giving me some horizontal lines and a sense of stability. Lastly, combined with the vertical columns, this picture makes one of the only photos I have that contains all 3 elemental lines...the stability of horizontal, the strength of vertical, and the excitement of diagonal. Often times, a scene may take many shots of different angles to achieve the best composition. Using the 50mm prime has taught me a lot about movement and repositioning.

Morning fishing

Out at Coyote Point, I went hunting for birds to capture some interesting photos to enter into a competition. This photo did not qualify because you could not clearly see the bird and see exactly what species it was, but I love the composition of showing both fisher types in the same frame. The correlation of the bird fishing the same waters as the humans hit a chord in me showing how we can so easily co-exist with nature.

Using my 70-200mm f/4 L lens, it was so easy to get such great blur on the people fishing in the background. Birds are easily scared by the noises our cameras make, as well as anyone approaching closely to them. I wish I had a longer lens, but you make due with what you got when the opportunity arrives. Set to max focal range with the widest aperture, I was able to really crop most of the scenery out. The great benefit of using a telephoto lens is that it is able to compress the objects in the distance to make them seem closer. This let me really tighten up the image

Yellow Daisies On The Move

I have asked a lot of people how they would have oriented this picture (vertically or horizontally). Most come back saying vertically, even though that is not how the plant grew. Horizontally is actually the right orientation for the plant if you were to see the entire plant. This picture makes me feel like the plant is going or reaching somewhere. The flowers are all reaching towards the left of the frame, seeming to pull the leaves and the rest of the plant along with them. The one unopened bud facing the camera looks alien to me. Like it is about to open up to peer at what I am doing.

Using the 100mm macro lens, I was fairly close to the plant. I knew I wanted some of the flowers in focus and the rest out of focus to give more depth to the picture. Almost like the ones on the left side of the frame have moved further than the others. At such close distances, every stop on the aperture counts for a lot. I used f/6.3 for this photo. I love my macro lens. The bokeh on the background is fantastic.

New Orleans Trolley in Action

One of my favorite photos. This is a trolley running in the French Quarter area near the Mississippi River. I like how it gives the sense of watching the trolley roll by with the background blurred from motion. If a person were to be standing there looking at the trolley, their eyes would have the same effect. The trolley would be in focus as you track it and the background would just scroll by.

To achieve this effect, I set the camera to AI Servo mode to track the trolley and continually focus on it. I set the speed fairly slow for this telephoto lens (1/30). I knew that at that speed, moving the camera across the background would blur it. Being that the lens was also non-ImageStabilized, I chose that speed as the slowest at which I could keep the trolley in focus. It's more of a problem of tracking and keeping the same focus spot to keep the trolley sharp. Any slower and I would have had to track the trolley longer, and therefore increasing the risk of it becoming out of focus. Any faster and you would lose some of the background blur that gives it motion. Lastly, during cropping, I made sure to place the trolley to the right side of the frame to give the sense of movement towards the left side...reinforcing the in motion feeling.