Summertime at Ft Desoto

While at Ft Desoto the other evening, I saw this woman photographing something on the beach. I'm not sure if she was photographing the woman and boy walking in front of her, or just the beach in general.

For me, I saw a perfect shot with the Laughing Gulls flying all around her and the pink tinge in the clouds that can only be seen during sunset.

When photographing the sunset, we usually get mesmerized by the beauty of the sunset itself. Don't forget to turn around. You just might spot a much better image like this one. The light is warm, directional and the textures, forms and shapes are brought out like no other lighting.

For this image, the light was coming from the sun about a 90° angle to my subject which as previously mentioned, brought out the texture in the sand and sea grasses. I shot this image at 1/800 (to stop the motion of the birds in flight) at F5. Since there was a lot of light areas, I added 1 stop exposure compensation to keep the birds, skin tones and sky from being underexposed. For those of you who use point-n-shoot cameras, if you have a beach or snow mode, this would work well for this type of image. My ISO was set at 200 and I used my 55-250mm lens at 96mm. I used Aperture Priority mode and Partial metering.

Patriotic Sisters

These two sisters were all dressed up to participate in the 2008 9-11 Peace Walk in Safety Harbor, Florida, to honor the lost souls from the 9/11 World Trade Towers incident. They walked a mile with their parents after attending a ceremony which included fire-fighters from Safety Harbor who worked at Ground Zero. The looks on their little innocent faces said it all for me.

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