I found this little guy sitting on a tree on the way out

I got to make another trip to Robinson Preserve a couple of days ago, this time with a friend specifically to go photographing.  I only shot with my 70-200 f/4 this time, and it turned out surprisingly well, for the short focal length.  Hopefully next time, though, I’ll have access to a 400 f/5.6 again, which will give me an awfully better view of the wildlife.  In the meantime, I made do well enough at 200mm, just had to be a little bit sneaky with the assorted creatures (birds, mostly).  And, of course, there was a little bit of cropping involved in post processing, but I guess that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

A bee taking off from a flower

The trip was good fun, and I managed to make an entire circuit around one side of the park (the one that stretches out to Tampa Bay).  Perhaps next time we can go the other way, down to the causeway to Anna Maria.  Towards the entrance of the park, there isn’t a whole lot in the way of tree cover, so we mostly stuck to photographing the insects that flew around the various flowers and grasses.  Moving on a little further, we came to the watery part of the park, where we managed to catch some birds hanging around the water, and even a couple of them in flight, skimming over the water or soaring up in the skies (the former proved easier to photograph).  Then we trekked on through the mangroves and marshey areas, and found a nice little flock of ibis pecking their way around in the water.

A white heron, flying just above the water

The park itself is still looking just as pleasant as always, and they seem to be making process on the visitor center (which they’re putting in an old, dilapidated house) and the camp site.  I also noticed that they’ve added dispensers with doggy bags, which I’m pretty sure was my mother’s doing.  Apparently she took the dogs for a walk there one day, and they did their business, whereupon my mom realized she was out of bags.  By amazing coincidence, she ran into a woman who took issue with the situation, and despite my mom having gone to her car to fetch a bag with which to clean up the mess, managed to get a park ranger to issue her a ticket for failing to pick up after the dogs.  So, in any case, she complained about it, and got them to put in dog bag dispensers.

A great blue heron, framed up by mangroves

And, with the exception of the dog bag drama, I don’t believe anything else of any great consequence has really been going on.  Robinson preserve continues to be awesome, just like always, and with any luck I’ll get a good chance to thoroughly explore the other part of the park sometime later in the Summer.  The other way isn’t circuitous, but rather lets out onto the causeway to the island, so I’m thinking some sort of a switchup with vehicles might be ideal.  That is, park one car at the park entrance, put two people in another, drive it down to the causeway entrance, walk all the way through to the main entrance, and then drive back to the other car.  Or something like that.  I’ll leave that planning to another day, and for now settle with the images I have.

A shot in front of the pond. Lit by an SB-25 in a shoot-through umbrella to camera left, and a bare gelled SB-26 to camera right, for hairlight

Got a light meter recently, and I must say, incident metering is absolutely, immensely awesome.  I can now just stick the meter right up in someone’s face and get a perfect exposure straight-off: no chimping or guessing.  And as an added bonus, it even tells you how much of the exposure is made up by flash and ambient.  So, new meter in hand, I took a trip out to the recently opened Robinson Preserve, to give it a little test run, and have fun in the park, of course.

Strictly speaking, I guess you could say I took two trips to Robinson Preserve.  My girlfriend, Danielle, oh-so-nicely agreed to help out for both of them.  The first time we went out, it was already getting close to sunset, so I set her in front of a pond, on a rock, with some trees in the background, threw up an umbrella and hairlight, and just got in some relatively quick shots.  And then it rained.  Thankfully, nothing got too destroyed from the water, and as it turns out, photographic umbrellas will, in fact, shield you, your girlfriend, and your equipment from rain.  As near as I can tell, there haven’t been any adverse side-effects on the umbrella, other than it having been a little damp for some time.

A shot from the second session, atop the observation tower. Lit by a single CTO-gelled SB-25, to camera right (and firmly secured to the railing, of course)

A couple days later, we came back an hour or two before the sun went down, so we had a little more time to work with.  My first idea was to put her up on top of the observation tower with a light up there, and shoot from down below (you gotta love Pocket Wizards).  The shot sort of worked, but the sky, unfortunately, was in no mood to give up any sort of decent looking background: nothing but bleak, pale-yellow, hazy sunset sky.  So I just more or less ignored those shots: a couple are still sitting on my hard drive, but they’ll probably be there forever.  I would definitely like to retry the concept, but with better skies.  Also a longer lens, as I was just barely getting a decent full-body shot at 200mm.  It sure would be nice to give it a try with the 400mm f/5.6 I rented up in Canada, but those are mighty expensive, so it’ll have to wait, for now.

A more pensive Danielle. Same lighting setup as before, this time shooting at a steeper angle.

After that, though, I went back up and shot from the deck, which worked much better.  Also, since we were on the middle level of the tower, I was able to climb the stairs a little to get up higher and shoot down, which you’ll see in the second shot, to get a nice watery background (the entire tower is surrounded by water).  I should note that the meter worked exactly as expected in both situations, which is to say excellently (for anyone wondering, it’s the Sekonic L-358 I’m talking about).  Now I just have to hold off on the urge to buy the Pocket Wizard transmitter add-on for it, so I can go totally wireless with just the meter, and not have to worry about manually tripping my lights.  In the mean time, though, it’s working fine,  and Danielle is proving to be an excellent model: and you can’t beat one that’ll work for dinner.

Robinson Preserve is definitely showing promise as a portrait location.  These two sessions are the only ones I’ve really done since the park has opened, and I’ve already found two excellent locations within a 15 minute walk of the parking lot (one within a half minute walk).  There’s still a lot of awesome locations that I saw when I initially visited, and no doubt many more that I haven’t seen hiding in all the miles of trails.  My biggest problem will be taking note of the ones closest to the park’s entrances (apparently there’s another entrance further South that I’ll need to investigate), as it can be a pretty long walk to get back into the trails.  While I can certainly drag myself back there, it would be pretty difficult, I’m sure, to get a paying client back that far, unless they were a particularly intrepid outdoors-person.  That’s all a matter for a different day, though.  For now, I’m extremely satisfied just with the couple of locations I’ve scouted out, and excited to find more.

A lake near the entrance to Robinson Preserve

They opened a new nature preserve in Bradenton today, so I got myself up out of bed nice and early (and by early, I mean 8:00 AM.  This is Summer time, folks) and made my way over to the grand opening, and met up with a friend, Farrah.  It was quite the speech-giving occasion, with all the county commissioners there to give their own special insights about the preserve, which is pretty big and mightily awesome, but probably not worth quite as much lip-service as they gave it.

Anyways, they opened up the park, and it was a very pleasant place to be.  There were people all over the place (although the park was big, so they spread out nicely), many of whom I knew: even ran into my old English teacher.  I went mostly for the sake of photography, but ended up doing surprisingly little of it, and more just exploring the park.  To the right you’ll see a quick shot I made of the lake near the entrance.

One of the spiders in question

There were some booths set up with granola bars and water, which turned out massively handy, because I ate about three spoonfuls of yogurt on my way out the door that morning.  We ended up taking a wagon-ride back along the trails, and it dropped us off by the water.  Along a walkway, there were some nifty spiders setting up webs in the trees, so we stopped for a little spider-photographing fun.

Farrah, photographing one of the spiders in question

Of course, along with the spiders, I had to grab a shot of Farrah photographing the spiders.  Not a masterpiece by any means, but I think it gets the job done.  After that, we headed back to the cars, as Farrah had to leave.  I’d planned on heading up to the watch tower (they have a really, really tall watch tower) to try and make some landscapes with my old Kodak foldout (which I’m still battling light-leaks in), but it was a hot day, and I just didn’t have the will to go back out along the trails.  So I’ll save the tower for another day.  I’ll have to do some portraits in there sometime too, as there seem to be some excellent locations scattered throughout the park.