MichaelBagleyPhoto's Blog

There’s an old adage in photography – “What’s the best way to capture great photographs?  f8 and be there.”  In other words, if you’re not out there you can’t possibly shoot great photographs.

Now that the sailing season in the Northeast is coming to an end, we decided to heed those words of wisdom and flex our shutters.  With no particular destination or subject matter in mind, we set out with cameras, lenses, tripods and our brains to see what we could see.  And shoot.

It was great exercise, both for our shutters and our creative minds.  We used all of our lenses – telephoto, wide angle, Lensbaby, fisheye – to show the same scene through radically different views.  We wandered through fields of wildflowers as the 20 mph winds swirled about.  How could we freeze that motion?  How could we use that motion to our advantage?  We found moving water and experimented with using shutter speeds and apertures to make the same water look different in every shot.  And we happened upon a group of windsurfers which provided the familiar opportunity to shoot some sails.

Here are a few of our 300+ shots from our safari. They may not win any awards or make it into National Geographic, but that’s not the point. The point is that we learned a lot and had fun. If you have a camera, get out there and have some fun of your own.

Brave grass

Catching air

Split rail, tall grass

Water bubble

Rippin'

What're you looking at?

Lakehouse, Lensbabied