Category: Photography

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Board of Directors

Group of VulturesI have been working for the same company for nearly 10 years. I came in this morning to find that someone who has put over 18 years at this company is leaving to follow his passion to become a professor and to get out of this city. Keep in mind that this company pretty much hires people for life. In my 10 years here, I’ve seen people work here for 30 years and die before they even hit retirement. One of my co-workers calls this place the “Hotel California”, you check in but you do not check out. So undoubtedly, this individual who is making the move to leave after such a long tenure was brave.

With the state of the economy, the constant trend for companies is to lay off people to cut costs until recently the tide has turned much to the surprise of companies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of voluntary resignations has surpassed the number of layoffs in February of 2010 for the first time since October 2008.  One such cause is that with the cost cutting that companies do, they are no filling in where people have left or cut thereby stressing those that are staying in the job. Companies have been taking advantage at increasing the load on their workforce because people were too afraid to let go of what they already have. Personally, I have a great paying job, with great benefits. The greatness of the job has degraded since one of the people on our 4 person team left, and they did not refill the position. They did not promote me into his position and I am left to do all the work he was paid to do.

Another big reason why people are leaving their jobs is also attributed to career advancement. With the job shortage, people were too gun shy to leave their jobs and it has created a backlog of workers looking to aggressively promote themselves into new positions in other companies. The days of devoting yourself to one company and rising through the ranks through hard work is in the rear view mirror. The companies that you can actually do that at are far and few between. Even the company I am employed with has a trend to hire outside this office.

We have been staring that these same cube walls for years. We spend most of our days watching our kids grow up through pictures on our cube walls at the expense of making someone else rich. Through that time, we have been a slave to our debtors, buying things we cannot afford and now chained to a desk working off our illusions of fancy lifestyles and conspicuous consumption to live the American dream. This is a voluntary life release program, you can go home every day to live your life, but you better be back.

About the photo

I took this photo in Mount Dora on a photo walk one morning. Those vultures were all hanging out on the chimney, and my buddy said “Look it’s the board of directors”. Vultures are a sign of death and bad luck. Working for someone else, you are sacrificing your life so they can squeeze all the good qualities out of you for their gain.

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18-200mm VR2

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Bank Owned

Anyone who is going through turmoil as a result of an unstable economy or even a financial situation should feel like what this picture exemplifies. Most Americans rely on banks to provide things that we would normally not be able to afford on our own. Through that, they rely on a great source of income. Those who have lost that source of income, are now faced with the heavy burden of handling the finances for investments that at one time were a “sure bet”. The bank, alone is a master standing tall over you, thirsting for your pittance in return for your freedom to continue on until the next time it is demanded from you.

Some people, never wake up from being slaves to this financial institution. Most people are so blinded by consumerism and keeping up with their neighbors, they gladly give up their financial freedom to give off the illusion of status.

The bible states Proverbs 22:7, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.” There is no doubt that debt can take over the choices you have in life. The more you have the more it limits those choices.

About the photo

I managed to make my way to downtown Orlando to work on night photography. I love going downtown because it is busy with life, lights and architecture. With this shot, we managed to scale an open parking garage at the base of the BB&T building. Unfortunately, due to the high wall surrounding this particular parking garage, we became limited with our options. Framing up shots with the wall in the way without having a low building perspective was not easy. However, I figured I would take advantage of that perspective and shoot this building from the bottom up. Other than some slight contrast updates this picture is right out of the camera.

I took this picture with my Nikon D90 mounted on a tripod with a remote release.

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18-200mm VR2

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Sleepy Marina

As the sun fell into the far off distance of the St. John’s river out in Sanford, I turned just the opposite direction and really liked the blue tone setting on the Marina. The amount of light left after the sun had disappeared was still enough to provide a reflection of the the boats on the water. The streaks of illumination in surrounded by lights added a nice touch to the picture, bringing in a bit of color to the overpowering blue tone.

I had my camera mounted on a tripod and used a remote release.

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18 200mm vr2

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Busy Bee

On my first photo walk at Henry P Leu gardens, I was lucky enough to come across a bee tending to a flower. When photographing flowers around the gardens, I did not switch to my macro lens but used the full length of my 200mm zoom lens. I was aiming for the same results that is implemented with portraits while diminishing sharp longitudinal features and building a nice bokeh in the back ground. However, a macro lens would have been ideal for this shot as it would have sharped up the subject while retaining the nice bokeh.

Bokeh is derived from the Japanese word boke or verb bokase, which literally means blurred. Parts of the images are blurred intentionally to create depth. Using the right amount of bokeh in the right places can truly make your subject “pop”. Bokeh should represent soft and rounded edges to the objects, which is commonly described as “smooth and creamy”.

Nikon D90, 18-200mm vr.

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Contemplation

At the park that I shot the boathouse, I happened to walk by this bench on the way out to the lake edge you can see in the background.

As ordinary as a park bench may seem, it is a holding station for taking in the scenery around you. A park bench can help you work through problems, change your mood or become a stage for making memories. The way that I wanted to photograph this with the lake in the background was purely for contemplation. Imagine, for a moment that if you lost something important to you like a friend, job or spouse etc. You spend time contemplating the past, present and future.

I simply shot this with my zoom lens, taking account that since it was not in direct sunlight that I would bring down the shutter speed to grab as much data as I could so I can brighten it up just a tad in post. I added a tiny bit of saturation to bring up the vibrancy of the greens.

D90, 18-200mm vr

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Unity

Unity

Out at our Sanford photo shoot, one of the first places we walked down was the back side of the main street to get into the less commonly seen portions of the city. This is one of the first things that really caught my eye. While this may be quite ordinary, I wanted project the symbolism of unity or a relationship through this picture. I really like the rusty old fences being held together by a colorful chain.

I hand held the camera for this picture. Since it was located in between two buildings, I really did not have light on my side. I opened the aperture up to keep a thin depth of field and brought the shutter speed down a bit. In post, I lightened up the picture a bit more and added a hint of saturation to restore the chain’s luster that was lost in the low light.

D90, 18-200mm lens

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Banner Elk

Banner Elk, NC

A few months ago, I went up to North Carolina to drive a stretch of US129 in the Deal’s Gap area. This length of road is approximately 11 miles and includes 318 turns. This is commonly called “Tail of The Dragon”. What a great experience this was to have a few days to spend up in the clear air of the mountains taking in the beauty of everything around me. The last day of the trip I took a day trip up to Banner Elk, NC. to see and old friend from the Marines.

On the way back, I decided to stay off the interstate and take the highways to see as much as I possibly could. I could not believe how many churches there were! My friend tells me I was driving through the “Bible belt”. Aside from churches was an abundance of farm houses. This particular picture I took out of the passenger window of my car while I was heading to my buddies house depicts a big field with two such barns. He told me that the symbols on the barns are included in a region wide effort to get tourists to find them all and take pictures of them. In the background, you will see pointy cone shape trees, those are budding Christmas trees. I understand this area is the leader of growing and selling Christmas trees.

Nikon D90, 18-200mm lens

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Broken Reflections

One of the coolest things about photography is being able to look at the everyday mundane things and find them to be extraordinary. I was walking around Sanford and came to this abandoned area behind first street. Inside of a chain linked fence was a cement slab with a random broken mirror. What really caught my eye was how the blue sky was reflecting off of the mirrors at me, so I put my lens right up to the fence and captured this one. There is so much beauty in in the smooth reflective fragments of glass lying on top of a forgotten, rough cement platform.

With this photo, I brought the shadows out and increased the saturation a tad to really bring the blue out.

Nikon D90, 18-200mm VR2 lens

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The Boathouse

In Mount Dora, walk to the end of North Donnelly street and you will walk into a very nice park that meets the edge of Lake Dora. This park can be seen on Google Maps, although it is unmarked, it is a great place to take in a sun set over the lake or just a place to stop and think. Adjacent to this park is the Mount Dora Boating Center and Marina.

Pointing the camera right into the sun is pretty tricky and the better results come from not using automatic mode. Essentially, this requires closing the aperture down to f20 or f22 to get the sun beams to flare out. Despite the smaller aperture, you will be exposing directly into the sun so bias towards a quicker shutter speed. Thankfully with using a digital camera, you are allowed to experiment with aperture and shutter first hand to see how it affects the final result. I do not want to detract from those who believe that there are specific mathematical rules to trying to figure out what shutter speed to use with what aperture. The basic rule of thumb is that every stop on the aperture requires twice or half the shutter speed you were at to maintain the same exposure.

D90, 18-200mm VR2

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Divine Crossings

Looking back through my photos that I have taken recently, I’m rather intrigued by how much I am attracted to train technology. With this particular picture, this sign caught my eye and came out pretty well. I purposely had symbolism in mind by lining up the sun behind the sign with an explosion of clouds filling the sky.

I imagined that this picture would symbolize the a milestone in the life of a Christian.

This picture was taken with a D90, 18-200MM VR lens