Channelside Street Car Station

Oftentimes when we go out to shoot, we are limiting ourselves to only one subject. Today, my group and I went on a trolley tour of Tampa. We did this last month and had so much fun we decided to make it a monthly meetup. We start at a different station and take a different route each time we do this and challenge ourselves to make as many different kind of images possible.

Our first stop today was the Channelside district. The trolley station is in the mid ground with the Marriot Hotel in the background. That's two members of my group in the foreground taking photos of the Embassy Suites Hotel. As you can see, Mother Nature cooperated and gave us some nice clouds and it was a nice day; not too hot.

As we got further into the shoot, one person would make a shot and then everyone would try to one-up him on his shot, but by shooting the same thing. It's challenging, educational and fun. I'll probably be posting more of these shots throughout the week.

Great Egret

We had yet another meetup yesterday and what a fun meetup it was!

We took a trolley tour throughout Tampa. There were 16 of us that started in Ybor City in Tampa. Some of the attendees wondered if we had an itinerary; but that was the beauty of the tour. There was no itinerary, we just bought day tickets (only $5) and rode the trolley until we saw a place where we wanted to get off. Then we'd shoot some photos at that place, grab another trolley and go somewhere else.

As stated, we began in Ybor City and rode to Channelside for our first stop. Channelside is a shopping and entertainment district in front of the Port of Tampa. We photographed that area for a while, then walked over to the Florida Aquarium, which is where I photographed this Great Egret outside the Aquarium in a swamp area.

We got back on another trolley and rode it toward the Tampa Convention Center, where we discovered the beautiful Embasy Suites Hotel. I asked permission to photograph there and it was granted. We all concentrated on the many lines and graphic possibilities when looking straight up from the lobby through the 20 floors to the top. From there, we went outside on one of the terraces where they have a lap pool and sun deck.

Once we had enough of the Embassy Suites, we hopped another trolley and headed back to Ybor City. There we went to the Green Iguana bar/restaurant for dinner. It was so much fun, we've decided to do this sort of thing on a monthly basis. I'll be posting more photos from this meetup as time goes on--if I ever get caught up on editing all the photos I've taken during the last week.