Living on Long Island can sometimes be frustrating. We drive to work every day and deal with vicious traffic on the roadways. Driving anywhere on Long Island at most times is not fun. I actually found myself considering the possibility of a move out of state if an opportunity presented itself. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed possible, but I didn’t want to be driven away from the place I grew up and leave my family and friends.
I felt the need to balance this frustration by considering all the high points about LI. Living in an over-populated place does have its benefits when you are a small business owner. More people equal more potential customers. I tried to transform my frustration into focus and directed it into my business ideas. I am not a marketing guru, I simply wanted to design the best store front I could so I could feel proud to be behind it.
My passion is not just in the picture taking, but also in the design aspect. I loved building my website. In fact I enjoyed it so much that shortly after completing the design, I felt something was missing. I had an idea to expand my photography to more than just photojournalism. I love shooting weddings and events, but these are not pictures to hang in my home, they are for other people to hang in their homes. By capturing some nice images worthy of framing and hanging, it would possibly fill that void. Getting up early for sunrise or driving to a scenic spot for sunset, I began taking some images that were just OK. At first they didn’t show up in camera the way I had envisioned them in my mind. I realized that landscape photography was much more than just framing a scene and snapping the shutter. This was something that required a lot of practice.
My Scenes Over Long Island gallery is a growing collection of images I have captured to photographically express the beauty of Long Island. I hope you visit and enjoy the images I have captured.
each on Friday to check out the planes at the practice session. The practice session is cool because you pretty much get the full air show without the weekend crowds and traffic. It really is awesome and Chris was loving it. Armed with headphones to protect his ears and sun block to protect his skin, he was ready to see some fast-flying jets and acrobatic prop planes. I love to photograph these air shows. Chris and I get to relive the experience when we get home and review the images.
Another obvious factor in which to give serious consideration is that you are shooting into the sky. If you do this while the camera is set on program mode or any type of creative mode where the camera chooses the aperture or shutter speed based on the metered scene, you will usually end up with an image that is seriously underexposed. This is because the sky is very bright. The camera will stop down the exposure so the sky is not too hot and this will in turn make the subject that much darker. You can still use creative modes (I prefer aperture priority). You just have to use exposure compensation. I actually used aperture priority mode for most of the shots I took, with +1 2/3 or +2 stops exposure compensation. The exposure changes slightly while moving around constantly, so the camera figures out the exposure and adds 2 stops to whatever it figures is correct. This works pretty well.