Photowalk 12 - Silver Lake... maternity shots

This week I went to Silver Lake in Dover.  To give you an idea of how little I explored my area
before I literally worked maybe 1000 feet from this park for 3 years of my life and never went to it.  Is that depressing or what?!?!  My wife and I went here to get some maternity shots of her.  She is showing pretty good at this point and we wanted to commemorate this.  As people photography really isn't one of my things I enjoy we tried and we will try a few more times but in the end we will have some pro shots done.  For many reasons really, first off I want to be in some of the shots and, not that it's impossible but it's a lot more work than what I want.  While we were walking around I snapped a few shots for my photowalk.  Please feel free to check them out at my 52 photowalk set on flickr.

While walking around and trying to get these shots of my beautiful wife I learned a few things.  First, the weather was supposed to be overcast and nice with a chance of a drizzle.  It turned out to be sunny with passing clouds, very windy and no rain.  As I looked at my shots I realized that there were 3 things wrong with most of them.

• The sun was harsh.  It's just starting to get warm out here so the trees don't have much on them to block the sun nicely.  I should have found a good location and stayed their instead of constantly moving around.  But that is what happens when you've never been to a location before.  Scouting ahead of time is great if you can.
• The shadows from the tree branches were rough.  I have a nice flash that would have help to alleviate those shadows.  I even had it on me.  But it doesn't help if you don't use it!  I can make up all kinds of excuses as to why I didn't break it out but it really comes down to laziness ;)
• I was using my OM 50mm lens for some of the shots to get some nice bokeh (to help blur the buildings in the background).  Remember these lenses are manual focus only and the view through the viewfinder looked in focus and crisp.  Most weren't :(  I did learn that I should be shooting with the live view in these situations and use the 10x zoom to check focus when I need to.  I didn't think my camera could zoom while taking the shots, but it can and I will use that to get a much better idea of focus from now on.

We plan to go out again and try to get some more maternity shots.  Either way we got a few that turned out decent and that's better than none.  Till the next walk...  

DM|ZE
Check out my flickr