Prepare for the Best

A photo posted by @photoquist on Dec 12, 2014 at 4:16am PST

"Expect the best. Prepare for the worst," the saying goes. Prepare for the best, too. You'd hate not to be ready if it happened.

Oh, and follow me on Instagram: @PhotoQuist.

Back on Instagram

I have returned to Instagram. Find me at "photoquist." I had deleted all my photos from the service after it had announced in 2012, I think, that it would let commercial advertisers use people's photos, presumably for a fee that it would not share with the user. It backed off that idea in the face of a massive backlash, but I had enough concerns to stop using it then.

With no new horror stories lately, I dip my toe back in the water, if only sharing web-sized photos for now.

Parrot Heads

That title refers not to Jimmy Buffet fans, but to actual birds. I took some shots at Sarasota Jungle Gardens last week. My apologies if they're too large to view on your screen. My photo blog has more, and better, shots that are landscape oriented (wider than they are tall) and may also fit your screen better.

Lido Key Sunset

Sarasota Jungle Gardens

The words "Sarasota" and "jungle" don't often appear in the same sentence. Sarasota Jungle Gardens is a tourist attraction where I once shot a freelance story. In fact, here's the video:



I went back yesterday with a couple members of the local photo group to which I belong. No alligators bellowed. I see gators in the wild occasionally anyway so I focused on the parrots and flamingos.



There are more shots of parrots in from this shoot on my photo blog.

Lowry Park Zoo Photos

I spent Friday getting rained on while feeding mosquitoes at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo. Also, I took some photographs. I was disappointed that the tigers and cheetahs got the day off. But, don't worry, I still got to pay the full admission price of $20.95



There are landscape (horizontally oriented) photos over on my photo blog, not here only because they won't fit. Be warned there is monkey porn.

Eye to Eye

Sandhill cranes are used to people on golf courses. They also know that golf carts often mean available food. They have no compunction about stealing anything they can reach, though many people feed them voluntarily. This all means that you can get very close and the bird will just stand there looking at you.

If you happen to have your camera handy, especially if said camera has lens that will zoom to 300mm, you can get a close-up shot like this:



And, yes, that was the closest thing to a birdie I got all day. I shot a 96.

Back to the Track

The bicycle racing track, that is. I stayed longer but seemed to get fewer good shots than last time. One reason was that the schedule was different today. The riders actually do more jumping during practice so that's more photogenic than the races. Most of practice was over by the time I started shooting today.

Shooting and Photos

I did a freelance job Thursday and Friday for a Canadian production company. I don't think they want me to share a lot of details but it's a demo for a reality show that was one of the more unreal experiences I've had in video production.

Granted, my background is news so I'm not accustomed to staging events for the sake of the show much beyond asking people to interrupt an action so that we can re-set the camera in a different place so we can edit the shots together in a sequence.

That wasn't the case here. I know that there's precious little that's real about reality TV shows but I felt bad for the subject because she's not going to come off in a way that even remotely resembles how she really lives. And I'm not sure she'll be flattered by the portrayal, though to a lot of people there's no such thing as a bad appearance on television. Being seen is flattery enough.

They paid at the end of the second day of shooting and I got to work with a Sony HVR-Z1U camera and came away impressed.** Good picture, easy to use, not too heavy but enough heft to hold reasonably steady and the image stabilization worked well. Overall it was a good experience and proof that among all the spam and scams there are legitimate paying jobs to be found on craigslist.

Today I took another Sony camera, my A100 DSLR to a local BMX racing track and shot a few frames. The photo group I shoot with plans to go there next Saturday and the folks at the track say they'll outfit us with passes so we can go into the infield to get a greater variety of perspectives.



**Yes, I was actually hired as a camera operator and it surprised the people on site that videography comprises very little of my paying work. But they weren't disappointed. "The footage looked great," the field producer told me on our second day. They had reviewed the first day's tapes and sent some of the video back to their bosses in Toronto before our second day of shooting.

Shooting Motorcycles

With a camera, of course. A state park in Hernando County features an area open to motorcycle riders.



I shot about 800 frames of the same five shots. There's a montage with more photos on my photo blog, if you want to see more. That's not a ploy to funnel traffic to that site, it's layout is simply designed to show larger images than this blog's.

Forgot to Mention

I've been taking a lot of pictures. See more on my photo blog.

Dusted Off The Camera

And went to take some photographs. Tampa Bay Downs, the local horse racing track, has opened for the season. I'm not a betting man but I occasionally gamble a gallon or two of gas on whether I can capture the action at the track.



Then on the way home I stopped and squeezed off a few shots in downtown Tampa.

A Walk Among the Tombstones

A cliche to be sure but what is a cliche but a well-said phrase that we are too lazy to restate? The tombstones in question here are sometimes cracked, broken and even scattered. Tampa's first mayor is among the city's luminaries buried in Oaklawn cemetery.



You can see a slide show of more images on my photo blog, to which I send you not to drive up its traffic but because its format lets me display larger images.

Air & Space Museum

My brother Jim and I went to the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum at Dulles Airport. Our visit included a 30-minute guided tour that lasted two hours and 20 minutes.

Our guide was very thorough.

He explained that 10% of the Smithsonian's pieces are displayed at its museum in DC, another 10% are on loan to other museums and until the facility at Dulles came along, the rest were stored in a Maryland warehouse.

Now they're not. Here are a few shots, including some of the Enola Gay, one of the Concorde and one of a bald guy somehow related to me who turns 42 next week.



On the drive to and from the museum from my brother's place, we drove on Rt. 50 past one of our childhood neighborhoods in Chantilly, Va.

Don't Forget Your Tripod

And that's your photo tip of the day. I failed to bring my three-legged helper on a shoot this morning at Tampa's Lettuce Lake Park. I went with other members of the Riverview Digital Photography Meetup Group.



The long path leads to...



Spiders!

I put a slide show of more images on my photo blog.

Pennsylvania & New Jersey Gardens

Here are more images from my recent trip to Pennsylvania. They include some of the gardens I shot, their designer, her cat and a table in her house. This is a downsized version of the slide show and the compression has slightly distorted some of the images. See it normal size on my photo blog.

OK, I'm Back

Not that you were waiting.

I just returned from a trip to Pennsylvania that was part business, part pleasure. While there I designed and built a website for a friend's landscape architecture business. I took all the photographs for the site except for three "before" pictures.

Click Image to View Larger Size

That's the gallery page. I was really pleased how the whole site turned out. My friend wanted something simple and elegant. We agree that she got it. I'm not an expert website builder but I know enough HTML, CSS and Flash to get by. It helped to have some stunning scenery to photograph.


I also attended a reunion gathering for members of my high school's swim team. Everybody and their brothers were there. At least everybody who graduated in my class who was on the team. Even my brother. One of them, anyway.

Some of them I hadn't seen in nearly 20 years. It was good to see them again. Even better since no one tried to fit into a Speedo.

Another Ybor City Shooting

Yes, I know. I should find a new venue. I had signed up for an event called the Worldwide Photowalk. Scott Kelby, a photographer who writes digital photography and Photoshop books, hatched the idea as a book promotion. It now includes 24,000 camera toters in events around the world.

(My Firefox spellcheck is telling me that "toters" is not a word. It also believes that "spellcheck" is not a word. Hmph! Don't make me go back to Internet Explorer!)

Anyway. After last week's walk with the Riverview Digital Photography Meetup Group (glad I don't have to put that on a business card!), I didn't want to shoot in the middle of a Florida July afternoon at a place I've already shot numerous times.

But I had signed up. And, if nothing else, I show up when I say I'm going to show up. Give or take ten minutes. I knew there would be more people about at 4 p.m. than at 8 a.m. but I need to take more initiative about asking people if I can photograph them. I missed some good people shots.

Yet my fixation with railroad tracks continues. Here are a few of the vertically oriented shots.



Instead of the copyright notice © I finally thought to use that space to plug my photography website, photoquist.com. I'll learn me this marketing stuff yet.

Shot in Ybor City

Just photos. I went to the historic Ybor City section of Tampa this morning to take pictures. I didn't have a model this time, though I caught at least one bum still sleeping off the night before. I'm not sure that counts as someone posing.

There's something about shooting places that are often crowded while they're empty. Ybor City is party town Friday and Saturday and probably a lot of other nights, a fact which you can smell the following morning.

The $151 Photograph

Business is slow enough that the free in freelance is time. I was glad when I got a chance to do some volunteer work for the WUSF Radio Reading Service. I was less glad when I took a wrong turn on the way there, drove over a sidewalk and got a $151 citation from the USF campus police. $151 I could have spent on something I wanted.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Afterward I went to the USF Botanical Garden. I had brought my camera thinking I'd try to snap some shots in the butterfly garden. Of course, by the time I got finished with the police and did my reading, it was after 4 p.m. I stiffed them on the $5 entrance fee. I have already pledged enough to the university for one day.

So the picture below of the largest insect I have ever seen cost me $151 to take. I don't even know what it is. I just noticed a funny looking yellow color on a flower and went to investigate.


Trust me, that bug may have been three inches long.

It could have been worse. I got rained on and rushed back to my car. As I sat waiting to see if the rain would pass, I noticed two people coming out of the botanical gardens' gift shop and head to the the only two other cars in the lot.

That's when I realized the place was closing. Had the rain not sent me fleeing to my car I'd have been locked inside the gardens until 9 a.m. tomorrow. Just late enough to completely miss my shift doing the traffic at WFTS.

I can't afford to miss any paying work. I have a check to write. At least I won't have trouble finding time in my schedule to go to traffic school.