Pics from playing hooky

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I mentioned that we played hooky one day last week at the Hayden Run falls. Here are some pictures from that jaunt. Above, the falls, being captured by my wife’s iPhone. Yes, she is getting just a little testy with my meta inclinations. But she graciously put her phone back up so I could create this shot after I whimpered and gave her my best puppy-dog-eyes.

Almost as soon as we arrived, we spied a great blue heron landing in the creek. It explored a little bit, then moved out to the wider river. They aren’t terribly rare along the rivers of Columbus, but it is just so darn cool to see a bird that big.

Just a few steps down the trail after spotting the great blue heron, we spied a green heron. I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered these two birds in the same outing. I’m not sure I remember the last time I saw a green heron in the wild. That day, we saw two green herons and one or two great blues (hard to know if it flew off and came back, or just flew off). The green above spent a long time hunting in the shallows of the creek and was really cute to watch as it slowly, deliberately watch for unsuspecting fish. In the 10 minutes we watched, it didn’t go after a single fish.

The area under the Bethel Road bridge is easily accessible, and provides for some interesting photographic opportunities. I’ll definitely keep it in mind for a future band shoot.

And finally, I’ve repeated the image of us shooting each other, ’cause I love it so much. Good times playin’ hooky.

Pro-tip #38: Show the world less

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(Inspired by another Facebook friend posting 10 essentially identical pictures in a set of 10 pictures) Here’s another easy way to make yourself look like a better photographer (and a subject I’ve harped on before): don’t post everything you shoot. In fact, you should probably delete most of what you shoot. Above, the screen shot of the 8 photos I posted to Facebook from some time I spent with my daughter and her friend at their horseback riding lesson. I took (I’m guessing here) around 100 pictures in that 90 minutes. And I deleted the majority of them.

So the lesson here is that if you shot 30 identical pictures of a band or a kid at a birthday party, people really only care about the 1 or 2 that capture the moment. Your challenge, if you accept it, is to look at your pictures and pick the best ones. And when you do that, you’ll immediately appear better. And if you do that consistently, you’ll actually get better.

Chasing light in a horse barn

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My daughter has been taking horse-back-riding lessons for a few years, and last week, while playing hooky, I pulled out the camera during her lesson.

I played with a couple of different lenses, but almost exclusively, I ended up looking for back-lit opportunities.

Or side lit.

Horses are just awesome. The light in the barn is just beautiful. I just wish I wasn’t always worried that the horses were going to bite my ass.

Pro-tip #19: Break the ‘rules’

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Just a day after I gave a pro-tip to pay attention to back-grounds, I broke one of the corollaries to that rule–don’t have poles or branches sticking out of the back of someone’s head.

Actually, this shot is my interpretation of a recent DPS post. Besides, I was bored while watching my son’s soccer practice.

So my tip is that as soon as you learn about a ‘rule’ in photography, see what it feels like to break it. In my MPEX class, I make the point that in photography, ‘rules’ are more like ‘usually’. For example, the ‘rule of thirds’ says you should put your subject on a 1/3 line, or mo betta, on an intersection of two 1/3 lines. And this makes sense for some compositions, but definitely not all. Sometimes, the subject just has to be centered. Kiss it, rule of thirds.