hand held

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When we first arrived in New York, Brooklyn Bridge Park was one of our first stops. We originally went to go get ice cream but ended up walking across the Brooklyn bridge. Kind of.

But I did not have a tripod with me. Andrew and I were just planning on taking it easy and not really do much that evening since we were both tired from travel. No problem at all. As long as I have my camera, charged batteries and my memory card, I’m down for whatever and not having a tripod pushed me to find creative ways around that. So as Andrew was finishing up my ice cream (they gave me wayyyy too much), I was trying to find different ways to keep my camera sturdy in this evening light. I took quite a few shots. Some from the ground, some from leaning against trees, etc. This image turned out to be my favorite composition.

If you look towards the left of this image on the pier, you can see how there’s a fence there, right? Well that same thing was going on right in front of me so I kneeled down and put my camera on the ground, in between the wood from the pier and the iron fence. So thats what the foreground texture is. The wood grain. I love how it turned out and how it’s so noticeable. I also think it adds a different element to the image having the bottom half so dark. For some reason it kind of reminds me of Gotham City from Batman.

The settings for this image is 1.6 seconds at F7/1 ISO 800 with my Sony A7II 16-35mm.

Have a great weekend everyone! Hope you all have something fun planned and if you do, let me know in the comments. Stay safe! I can’t believe September is almost over….

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I remember shooting this last year. I was driving home from shooting the storm at the Washington Monument and was a little disappointed with how my pictures came out. There wasn’t one that I was extremely happy with or excited to work on but the rain had cut my photoshoot short. Sometimes it happens even on the worst weather days. And then as soon as I got to my car and start driving, the rain stopped. So I started filtering all the places I could go shoot on my way home when finally I realized the US Marine Corps War Memorial was perfect!

I drove up to the memorial and NO ONE was there. It was amazing! Usually there are bus loads of people here. But the rain must of scared them all away. So taking all the liberties I could, I parked my car right in front of the memorial. Yes, right along the drive path. Whatevs- no one was there anyways. I was only going to be there for 10 minutes tops. I didn’t even close my driver side door because I was so excited by the clouds. So I started shooting, shooting, shooting. No tripod, all hand held. The storm clouds were so dramatic and amazing. I was so grateful for this little break in the rain. My favorite part is seeing that little reflection of Iwo Jima in the puddle. I had to squat down real low for this one which also helped in making the storm clouds look even bigger.

My camera settings for this image was F5.6 at 1/15th of a second at ISO 640. Shooting handheld with such dark, dramatic skies, you have to put your ISO high to avoid any kind of motion blur. I also bracketed these shots so I could later choose which one turned out the best.