Imagine There's An Image

OK, it wasn't quite dawn, more like 8:00 AM last Thursday and Friday, but the light was pretty much as good as it gets on my morning stroll to work. The subject matter is the same as photos I've shot many times since I've been working downtown, but the lighting was just better those two days than I remember in quite a long time. In this first photo of the USS Constellation, for example, I've been trying for months to get an image that shows off the green hull bottom as well as the nice green reflection. This time, it worked out fine, and I got some great reflections from across the harbor as well. As a bonus, the western sky in the background was still dark enough not to show up as a washed-out nothingness, as it has in many of my earlier photos.

This next photo, Pigeon Convention, is partly a result of planning and partly luck. The planning involved me keeping a baggie of oatmeal in my backpack. There were already a lot of pigeons out and about that day, and throwing a handful of Quaker's on the ground in front of me brought a squadron of them right to me. The luck part was getting that symmetrical arrangement of my feathered friends. It took a number of handfuls of oatmeal, coupled with the quick response of my Canon A620, to get this shot.

This set of "dragons", paddleboats actually, are my favorite regular subject at the Baltimore Inner Harbor. But this particular day, the early-morning lighting really brings out the shapes and the colors. I must have hundreds of photos of these boats, taken since April 2004 - but the ones I took last week are definitely the best.

The thing that really made the differnce here, as with the next photo of the "regular" paddleboats, is shooting with the rising sun to my back. I ventured out on the paddleboat rental dock to shoot these images from a perspective different from most of the other ones I've taken.

I like the anthropomorphic look of this last image. Yeah, it's a cliché, but it works in this context. What I really was going for was the colorful boats, but I thought adding a "human" subject would be a nice touch.

I have some more from last week, but I'll leave them for another day.