Thursday evening I met up with several of my Flickr photographer friends for a photo walk. Tracy (Wilhemina Lump Lump), Eric (RestedTraveler), and James (James Wellman) and I gathered at the entrance to Falls Park for a downtown expedition. It turned out to be a great gathering, and we really learned quite a bit from each other about various photographic techniques.
When we first planned this outing we had scheduled it for a couple of weeks ago, right as the snow storm hit. The intent was to go out and try to do some long exposure photography. When we reschedule, we failed to take into account the time change, so we still had more daylight than we had planned. Oops.
Regardless, we took a few shots of the flowers at the entrance to the park, then headed on up to Main Street.
The problem is, we’ve all shot this area many, many times before. It was challenging to find a new perspective, a new angle, or just plain something different.
We stood on a corner comparing notes and chatting as cars passed us on the street. Someone mentioned taking panning shots, and we admitted that we weren’t so great at it. Turns out that we just weren’t using the correct focus mode on our cameras. Tracy and I were shooting with Nikons, and we found that the Autofocus Single (AF-S) was perfect for panning. All four of us stood at the corner of Court and Main Streets taking pictures of any moving vehicle that passed.
Tired of shooting cars and getting weird stares we headed back down to the Liberty Bridge where we shot some long-exposure photos. The bridge turned out to be very bouncy, so we headed up to the top of the Bowater parking garage.
From the top of the garage we had a great and river. We tried some panning shots as well as long exposure.
Our last stop was the amphitheater behind the Peace Center. For this last stop I used a long exposure with a rear curtain flash. I really like the effect.
It was my first time out with James and Tracy, and they turned out to be great folks to shoot with. Both have a very creative eye, and I’m impressed with their photography. Eric, as always, is great for a photo walk. I also think that four is a perfect number for one of these excursions. The last photo walk I went on was too large, and everyone kept getting into everyone else’s shots. This walk was nearly perfect – I learned several new techniques, and had a blast doing it. Four hours went by very quickly.