Fairchild Food and Garden Festival

When I moved back to Miami about a year ago, one of the first things I did was become a member of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. It costs me 80 bucks a year, but for that I get unlimited access to the fields of green and luscious plants 364 days a year (it's closed Christmas). Also included in membership is free admission to events like today's Food and Garden Festival, the scene of this week's photo project. Taking pictures at Fairchild is easy. There's no lack of subjects to photograph. Plants, people, insects, lizards, you name it and it's there. Only 5% of the park was explored today and still I got a bunch of neat shots. Photographing strangers is something I'm not entirely cool with yet. I love candid photos, like the one above, but taking them of people I don't know is tough. I used my monopod, continious shutter release and a spoonful of luck to get that shot. Spontanious photography is something I'd like to get better at. Quick snapshots on the street or something like that. Usually I just take pictures of inanimate objects. That's where I feel most comfortable, but we all need to leave our comfort zone sometime, right?


This week I've been learning the power of RAW images. Before I got the D60, all I shot in was JPEG. I'd heard of the wonder and magnificence of RAW, but not until now do I really understand. There's so much flexibility with it. And it helps a lot more in the post processing side of things. I don't know how I ever took pictures without it. Oh, a quick aside, while shooting today, my photographer friend Rigo and I ran into another pair of photographers who introduced me (Rigo already knew about it) to this thing called the Lensbaby. Check it out. There's some neat things it can do for a photograph. Much like a fisheye, it's a creative lens. Price tag isn't too expensive, so I might pick one up.


Anyway, today yielded many great shots. I'm finding it difficult to post just a few. Why not check them all out here instead? Most of the uploads are strait JPEG conversions from the RAW files, so the colors are off. I'll be fixing those little by little.