Virginia Photo Blog

Early morning light feels different than afternoon light. It's wake up light. It seems brighter, almost too bright. If you're not a morning person, you'll likely miss this kind of light. On this morning there was a cloudless blue sky, and the streets were empty. Bricks were orange and red was blood red. Long after the blue hour, it might be too bright for some photographers, but there is still a range of colorful light. Here are some photos from the fall of 2016. Gear Photos

Take a camera, even at night. If you see some color, there is a photo to be had. Find a place to set the camera down, and you can have a sharp, low ISO exposure. You only need a few seconds, even with the lens stopped down. No flash was used in any of the photos below. They all were taken with a Nikon Coolpix A, a crop sensor point and shoot. For cityscapes, that's really all you need. Even if a person walks through your picture, they'll disappear with an exposure of more tha

Sometimes the world paints a picture for you and all you have to do is frame it. The local YMCA in Orlando painted the picture, and all it took was a walk around the building to frame it. The rules were simple. If it's red, frame it. You can't have too much red in a picture. And if there's a little geometry, that helps too. And if you have all the primary colors, well, enough said. Someone at the YMCA was painting pictures for a morning photo shoot, and here it is. Gear Photo

This week is part two of the shooting at f/2.0 exercise. Many of the 500 keepers at f/2.0 could have been chosen for this post, but the ones chosen here provide an exercise within an exercise. Take a walk and see if you can make the objects along the way worth looking at because they were photographed at f/2.0. Is the scene better or worse? Is f/2.0 obvious? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. Something purely pedestrian may just be pedestrian, or maybe it's worth a seco

Peter Karbe, expert Leica lens designer, says that Leica lenses are designed to be shot wide open. Karbe says: “…shoot the lenses wide open. Do not stop down for exposure control. STOP IT. Use an ND filter if it is too bright out and please only stop down to control the depth of field...” Should you shoot all lenses wide open? Or is Leica advertising Leica? Should you blur the background in all your photos? If you spend a lot of money on an f/1.4 or f/2.0 lens, why not shoot

The Corner is a quarter mile of swag shops, greasy spoons, restaurants, and convenience stores along University Ave., roughly from about Chancellor street to the 14th street railroad bridge. In days past, bookstores and a cafeteria served university students across the street from the medical school. Today, the names of long gone stores are still painted on the sides of buildings, but a few historical bars and restaurants are still in business. At The White Spot, you can sti

State and local officials prepared for the one year anniversary of the Antifa riot in Charlottesville by declaring a preemptive state of emergency for the weekend of August 11-12, 2018. The downtown pedestrian mall was fenced off, roads were blocked with dump trucks, parks and recylcing centers were closed, and a long list of "Instruments of Riot" were banned in the city. The Governor and city Police Chief were determined to prevent any violent clashes between Antifa and supp

The edges of downtown fray rather quickly. A few blocks off the downtown mall puts you in the working areas. There you'll find the side streets, back streets, back doors, back walls, small businesses, apartments, parking lots, restaurants, unfinished buildings, and the daily life of the city. From the tops of the parking garages you can scan the surroundings and see the rooftop lawns and a bit of the countryside. There is a lot of grit downtown, and a bit of beauty, and some

The downtown pedestrian mall runs from 2nd street to 7th street. The Omni hotel anchors the west end, and the open air pavilion anchors the east end. There are 120 shops and 30 restaurants on the mall, as well as an indoor ice skating ring and several theaters. Main street was converted to a pedestrian street in 1976, and the mall thus began life as a closed venue. Today, several cross streets permit traffic, but not all. It was completely renovated in 2008. It's a mix of res

It was over before it started. If you had arrived at noon, the scheduled legal rally time, you'd have missed it. The riot began in the morning - August 12, 2017. Communists attacked the arriving speakers, the governor declared a state of emergency by 11:25 am, and the armored police had pushed the legal speakers out of the park by noon. Some stragglers remained, but mostly it looked like it was over. Still, there was more to come. Two hours after the emergency declaration, co