Category Archive for: ‘Florida HDR Photos’

A couple of weeks ago I headed down to Cocoa Beach, Florida to snap some photos of space shuttle Endeavour blasting off.  My friend and mentor, Trey Ratcliff, had been given special permission to take some close-up shots of the launch pad and called me 10 days prior to the launch and asked if I’d help him out by being his assistant.  Trey had previously arranged to rent several gigantic lenses from BorrowLenses.com and was going to need someone to help carry them around for him. Trey owns 2 high-end Nikon DSLR’s and also needed someone to “work” his 2nd camera during the actual liftoff.  Being the great friend that I am, I immediately agreed to help him. (Trey had already known how jealous I was about his upcoming shuttle launch adventure.  I believe the actual amount of time that I had to think about helping him out was less than one second.)

Unfortunately, the shuttle launch was scrubbed 4 hours prior to the scheduled launch due to a malfunction in a heater assembly unit thingy.  Since Trey and I had these incredibly awesome lenses at our disposal, we decided to make the most of them and headed to the beach to get some “action shots”.

Here's Trey and I showing off the lenses we rented, just before heading out to the beach to capture some beauty! I'm holding a 500mm F4 Nikon lens and Trey his holding a 600mm F4 Nikon Lens.

After attaching the “ridonkulously” huge lenses to our cameras, Trey and I left our hotel and began the fortunately short walk to the beach.  (The made-up word “Ridonkulous” is the exact word that Trey used when describing these lenses in an upcoming video I’ll be publishing on this site.)

As we arrived on the beach, we began setting up our tripods and attaching our cameras.  It was amazing how much attention we were getting.  I imagine most people thought we were with the paparazzi because once they spotted us, they quickly began looking in the direction our camera’s were pointing to see what/who we were snapping photos of.

We had about 5-6 people come up to us during our photo shoot. Most were just curious what we were doing and were very friendly.  One person came up who had recently started his photography hobby.  He mostly just drooled over our gear and asked us a bunch of questions.  I’m not even sure if the answers we provided were correct or not, but because we had these huge lenses, he probably just assumed we knew what we were talking about.

During our walk to the beach, we passed by the "Adult Emporium". Trey thought it would be funny to get a picture of him in front of their sign with him holding his camera/lens, so I snapped a quick photo with my iPhone's camera.

We ended up staying on the beach for about 1 1/2 hours.  We snapped photos of kite surfers, volleyball players, kids building sand castles, distant cruise ships, and women in bikinis. (How could we not get pictures of women in bikinis with these lenses at our disposal?)

As we were getting ready to pack up our gear and return back to our hotel room, an incredibly beautiful woman crossed my line of sight.  I pointed her out to Trey and we both just starred in her direction, hoping she’d soon be venturing into the water.  As luck would have it, that’s exactly what she did.  She was with two of her friends and they all darted down towards the water.

The lenses that Trey and I were using were really fast.  They allowed us to take photos with very fast shutter speeds which would freeze the action. Because of this, we both had our cameras set to rapid-shot mode.  What was so funny is that as soon as I would begin taking rapid-shots, Trey would also take rapid shots at the exact same time. It was as though each of our cameras were synced together.  For the next 5 minutes, we continued taking shots of this woman and couldn’t help but laugh a couple of times as our shutters continued with their synchronous shutter demonstration.

We took a lot of pictures of this young woman.  We couldn’t help it… She was very beautiful and almost all of the pictures we took of her made her appear as though she was at a swimsuit model photo shoot. What made these photos even that much better was the fact that she didn’t even know she was having her picture taken.  Even though our lenses were huge, she never spotted us because we were so far away.

This is what the original version of this photo looked like prior to any post-processing. As you can see, there were actually 3 people within the shot. Unfortunately, 2 of them didn't make the cut.

Bummer… You’re either not currently a “VIP Member” of this site, or you’re not logged in. If you were, you’d be able to watch a 30 minute video tutorial I made which shows you how I post-processed this photo in order to remove the 2 additional people who were in the original image. You’d also be able to see some of the additional pictures I took at the beach during this photo venture at the beach. Worry-not, however, for becoming a VIP Member is FREE and just a click away. Click here to learn more and signup.