Springtime in Oregon...
When winter finally decides to concede and let spring win out Oregon is a spectacular place to be...save for that random snow last week. There are a lot of really beautiful sights to see like the cherry blossoms on the Portland Waterfront, Multnomah Falls, but there's no finer example of the springtime beauty than the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival outside Woodburn, Oregon (approximately 30 minutes from SW Portland). If you're a photographer this is a spot not to be missed and if you're serious about it I'd strongly suggest the dawn photographer's tickets as it allows you access to the park EARLY. I managed to convince Tracy to tag along with me this year and we headed out Easter morning from SW PDX about 5:15 AM.
I've been here in past years and have always really enjoyed the time- plus it's great how they move around the landmarks (tractors, windmills, etc.) every year. I was especially happy that Tracy came with me to take photos this year AND was an absolute trooper about the 5 AM wake up call. She captured some amazing shots this morning using her trusty combo of the Sony A7iii and Tamron 28-75 F2.8 (A036).
Trying something new-ish
Having been to the festival a number of times I'd taken a pretty wide variety of photos and I wanted to challenge myself to do something different this year. Thinking back some of my favorite photos are those that feature sunstars so I set about deliberating on how to make images with more sunstars. The challenge is that doing so you need to photograph the sun (duh, right?) which creates its own set of challenges-mainly that to properly expose for the sun and sky the actual subject of the image is often far too dark. Generally, you can recover some (or most) of this in post production (and the Sony cameras are SPECTACULAR here) but to do it properly there needs to be more light. Generally, that means adding a flash-which again creates its own set of problems as most flash units/cameras only have a sync speed of 1/250th a second (or less). The way around that is to either use a very strong filter on the lens to lower the shutter speed to an acceptable level OR use a flash with High Speed Sync (basically it fires multiple flashes in a single image). I chose option 2 and in this case grabbed the Godox AD200 wireless strobe. It took a few moments to get it dialed in but I'm THRILLED with the images I got today. Seriously, they're some of the coolest ones I feel like I've shot in quite some while.
I think all in all we were out in the fields for about 90 minutes before returning home to a nice mid-morning nap. It was a great day and the cap to a great weekend.
