Foxy, originally uploaded by Miracle Man.

Holden Beach, NC — While enjoying our family vacation, a sister-in-law spotted a reddish colored cat running through the dunes between our beach house and the strand of Holden Beach.

While walking to the beach and back, you see several animal foot prints in the sand. Most look like dogs and birds (and there are several dogs in the area), though we even found deer tracks as well.

Tonight, while I was walking to the beach in an attempt to shoot some landscape photos, photos of the beach house and the sunset, my friend Murphy struck again. At least this time I had my camera.

I was surprised by a red fox.

I came to a fast halt hoping he had not seen me. Armed only with a Wide-Angle-to-Medium Telephoto lens (a Nikkor 24-120mm VR lens), I was not prepared to try and shoot wildlife. My 80-200 F2.8 would have been much better for this. Ergo, Murphy’s law at work.

Well the fox spotted me and my attempt to get the camera up to shoot him, spooked him and he took off running. The camera was set on ISO 100 and the lens’s minimum F5.6 @ 120mm pushed my shutter speed pretty low considering it sunset. So I tried to pan along with the bounding canine (see the inset photos.)

I knew after looking at the blurs on the background, that I had gotten some okay pan photos, but it still wasn’t what I wanted. For some reason I bumped the camera up to ISO 800 for the remainder of my walk to the strand.

Not more than 5 steps away was a second fox. This one had not noticed me yet, so I slowly brought the camera up to my eye and eased forward. I got 4 photos of the 2nd fox while he was reasonably still. He eventually caught my wind and bolted.

I wish I had my 80-200mm lens mounted, but the above photo is detailed enough for a web photo of the fox.

No cats this time. The mystery is solved.

Sunshine Girl, originally uploaded by Miracle Man.

This weekend, save offending a few family members was one of the best photo events I’ve participated in…

The Holden Beach Bikini Bash!

The concept was simple, with another photographer, makeup artist and hair stylist, go to the beach, bring a few bikini models along and shoot shoot shoot.

This summer, my wife’s family has rented a beach house at Holden Beach and I got the go ahead to shoot the first Sunday of the trip.

Makeup Artist Lollycat who I work a lot with recruited a great hair stylist to join me and fellow photographer Tom Winstead for the trip. We recruited several female modes and a male model. The plan was to shoot at various locations around Holden Beach.

The first call for makeup and hair was for 5am. New Model Sara, on her first shoot arrived the night before and the idea was to hit sunrise at 6:06. Well due to a late night before, and various reasons, we were a bit late getting to the beach. But that was okay. It gave Sara a chance to get some experience before the other models started to show up.

We had scheduled two shifts of models, a morning shift and an afternoon shift. One model couldn’t make it, but with four models we were still quite busy. I was surprised by the amount of downtime between actual shoots, but considering how tired we were at the end of the day, I’m glad we had them. We had planned to shoot until sunset, but we were too tired to make it.

We ended up with really good stuff and are already planning another trip.

Tom summed it up best “There are worse ways to spend a Sunday Afternoon!”.

Okay, so I hate myself for not taking my camera. But you know, I can do some cool things with Photoshop. But first let me say…..

As a professional photojournalist, what I did above is very unethical. This is not a photo, but a photo illustration. I would never attempt to pass this off as real. Disclaimed. I can now live with myself.

The photo scene is a mash up of three photos. The foreground photo, with the fountain, the statues playing in the water, fence was shot the night after the fireworks at Broadway at the Beach in Myrtle Beach, SC

The two fireworks shots are older shots which can be found in my Flickr photostream. Here are the two photos.

The two fireworks source photos.

The photos were added as separate layers on top of the original and placed to where they looked natural. Then using the eraser tool, I erased the edges so they blended in and opened holes to let the fountain and such so through.

So, its kinda what I saw, just a day later!!!

The point of this exercise through isn’t the act of making something in photoshop or making up for my forgetting the camera.  I did this to illustrate my previous comments about fireworks being boring unless they are anchored somewhere.

Looking at the two source photos, they are themselves okay as far as fireworks photos go, but they are nothing to write home about, but looking at the mashup with a foreground subject the photo is much more attractive

Let me count the ways….

Okay, I’m thinking Hate isn’t the right word. Perhaps Loath is a better choice.

Way #1

You see, I’ve been traveling a lot for business. That means most of my shooting time is at night and night photography benefits significantly from a tripod. My big aluminum Bogen with a nice ball head is a pain to travel with when I fly. So I’ve gotten pretty good with makeshift bean-bags. But here is my driving trip to Myrtle Beach and what did I do? I left the the tripod at home….. Doh!

Way #2

Murphy’s Law is in effect. Every time I don’t take my camera on a trip, I regret not having it with the exception of my last trip to Buffalo which I didn’t miss my camera. (Sorry friends in Buffalo, if you get my drift). So I have my camera on this trip and I’m looking forward to getting some good shots. In fact tonight at dinner, I saw some really good “Night Photography” opportunities.

So as I’m walking trough “Broadway at the Beach”, the huge monolithic tourist trap complete with a Hard Rock Cafe, and a KISS themed coffee shot, I’m saying to myself . . . “Man, I should have brought the camera. But don’t worry, I’ll come back, the lights are not going away.” It was at this time I realized that I forgot the tripod!!!!

I had a fantastic dinner at the Key West Grill. A reasonably Conch Republic themed restaurant that isn’t part of a chain. As I was paying my bill and getting ready to leave, some rather odd lights caught my eye.

Across the street (and coincidently two buildings down from my hotel) is a minor league baseball field and they happened to have a home game tonight.

It was Fireworks night.

Photographically, fireworks are fun to photograph, but there are a million photos of red and green bursts, some quite nice. But like Sunsets, the fireworks themselves doesn’t make for a strong photograph. You need something to give them a frame of reference. In the case of sunsets, there should be something, a tree, person, building that is silhouetted by the setting sun making them the subject and the sunset the setting. Fireworks are the same. Bursts of colorized burning pyrotechnics against a black sky is well boring, cliche and over done. But put something in the foreground, a statue, a building, a person and your off to creating a wonderful piece of art.

Well as I started walking back to the car there it was. A well lit, attractive foreground with the fireworks providing a beautiful background. The photo would have been perfect. It would have spiraled to #1 on Flickr Explore. It would have sold multiple times to various stock houses. I would have made enough to get my Nikon D3.

Would have.

No camera. No Tripod. And the event will not repeat while I’m here.

Oh How I Hate Me!

Note: Yep, there is no photo with this post because I forgot my camera!!!!!

Doh!

White Tiger

Originally uploaded by Miracle Man

I enjoy zoos and I try to get to them when I can. On a lot of my trips, there usually isn’t time to stop in. But on a recent trip, I managed to have a couple of hours before my flight to make a repeat visit to the Miami Metrozo.

Zoo’s basically come in two varieties: The older style zoos have their exhibits in cages for the most part. An example of this is the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. The other is more open natural habitats where cages are exchanged for pits with electric fencing to keep the animals in.

Generally zoos that cage are constrained on space. The natural habitats take lots of space. For an inner city zoo like Lincoln Park, they do an amazing job in so limited space.

The Miami Metrozoo is a natural habitat zoo. The walk is 3 miles covering 300 developed acres out of 750. They offer a monorail and rentable 2 and 4 seat quad-cycles to help get around.

I was a little unprepared for the price. Still, the price is reasonable at less than $14 per adult. I was expecting under $10 but thats what I get for not visiting the zoo in almost 10 years.

The Metrozoo’s showcase exhibit is the tigers which is just off the front entrance. They have two typical bengal tigers and one white tiger. They are beautiful. The exhibit is decorated with what appear to be ruins from older civilizations.

As a photographer, there isn’t a lot of motivation to leave this exhibit. In particular around feeding time as the tigers can be rather active. They are quite photogenic and with a reasonable 80-200 mm lens attached to most digital SLR’s you can expect to get reasonable photos.

Then you turn around and a pond filled with colorful Caribbean flamingos await your lens.

My trip to the zoo was cut short by rain. And if your used to life in South Florida, it rains pretty much every day, but they are brief popup showers and usually a few short minutes later the sun is evaporating the rain creating a lovely hot humid day. Well this day, it was destined to rain for the rest of the afternoon.

I had gotten about as far into the park as the gorillas which is a story in itself. Anyone questioning evolution would have realized today that Darwin was on to something.

The big silver back was sitting by hisself just to the left of an edge in the rocks. About 10 feet to his right around the other side of the edge sat an older female who was sporting a rather round mid-section. Yes, she was an expectant mom. No big deal so far. However, the expressions were priceless. The silverback clearly had the “I’m in the doghouse… Please let me out” expression on his face. The female’s face was full of anger. Clearly she was unhappy with the greyback and she was sending him a silent message through her expression. He was begging for forgiveness and she wasn’t falling for his charms.

Not a word was said, but it spoke volumes.

While on the subject of evolution, just around the big rock sat the chimpanzees who were munching on some lovely coconuts. However, several were using sticks to extract the meat much as we would use a fork or spoon. Yep, thats tool use. Evolution right in front of our eyes. Next up for them, Corvettes!

I decided it was time to leave once I realized how wet I was and how much fun it was going to be on the airplane soaked.

The flipside of evolution, proof that there is a greater power at work. On my way into the park, a plastic grocery bag was blowing across the parking lot. Now of course having the bag make it to a habitat would be bad so I picked it up and with the brooding skies, I decide to pocket it instead of trashing it.

My Nikon D200 was being protected by this lucky plastic bag which just happened to float its way to me. Someone was watching out for me that day.

On the way back out, the tigers were up and moving and alert. Rain or not, it was time to spend more time with the kittens. Using my already soaked Publix bag as a raincoat for my camera I snapped a few more shots of the cats and then some very active shore birds.

Enough was enough. Car, Lunch/Dinner, then off to MIA for my trip home.

So if your in Miami, spring $14 and go see this fabulous zoo.

The travel system is complex. Flights, multiple carriers, millions of bags, rain, equipment problems and a lot of really frustrated customers. Add to that rental cars, hotels, destinations and the TSA and you have to be amazed that the system works at all and doesn’t come to a grinding halt.

Take today for instance. My lovely wife drops me off at RDU (If your in Raleigh or a frequent traveler you will know thats the airport code for the Raleigh-Durham International Airport) for my trip to BUF (thats Buffalo, NY!). The weather was nice. Looks like we were off to a good start.

But lets back up a couple of weeks when the whole thing started. I get notice that I will be traveling to BUF for a business trip. No surprise, I do this alot. So step one. Go to the company required travel service. I won’t mention names, but its a business version of a popular web based travel site. I’m more and more convinced that they don’t give me all available flights. So after trying to find a suitable set of flights (times, layovers, FF Miles for where the bulk of my miles pile up, what planes are being used . . . and thats important to know!, options for upgrades . . . being a frequent flier has its perks!) I end up with a reasonable Sunday flight with an around 11am departure getting in to Sunny Buffalo around 4:30pm.

Thats not to bad, 7 hours in the travel system to avoid a 12 hour drive. But my flight had a 3 hour layover in Washington National (thats DCA for short). The airline web site had plenty of other options that my super portal didn’t have that would have avoided the layover!

The company I’m training this week wanted me to stay at a particular hotel which was sold out. So after a call to them (remember we still are a few weeks ago!), they booked me at the next best choice distance wise (but not a hotel on any of my frequent stay accounts.) and I booked my rental car (keep that in mind for later!). Okay, all set with the reservations. Get my training materials shipped in time. Get packed. Sunday arrives and we get back to the beginning, I’m at RDU.

Its at this point that alert readers should be told — I DID NOT bring my camera on this trip (GASP!). Sorry, no pics.

I grab a quick bite for breakfast since meals in route become tricky or horrid (yes that $5 will get you a snack box). Security was fairly fast to clear and since I didn’t check bags, my “Two Hours” before your flight meant I had time. So I strolled to my gate and sat down to wait on boarding time. The counter worker for (I will name the airline!) US Airways announced the flight was oversold and was looking for flexible fliers.

The first thing that runs through your mind is “Oh bummer, another packed flight with no place to put your bags”. Normally on outbound trips, I won’t give up a seat because the schedule is too tight, but today I felt as if I could be flexible, so I volunteered my seat. On return flights, I’m quick to give up my seat since I’m not under any pressure. Coincidently, I’ve never been selected for that free fight voucher! Even today, being the first in line, there was a good chance I would still make my flight. Its amazing how people just don’t show up!

“Passenger Robert Miracle please come to the podium”. Damn! I won. I’m getting my bump and my free round trip ticket! Sure enough I got bumped and was being put on a later flight to DCA which would still let me catch my original connection and get into BUF as planned! Sweet!!!! So my delay would be in RDU instead of DCA, no big deal. I ask myself, why wasn’t this later flight an option from that blasted online travel service?

So I hop online since I have time to kill and would be a good chance to study the company I’m going to be training. I coincidently looked up my new flight to find out what kind of equipment I’m on (yup, a smaller regional jet, time to green/yellow tag the one bag since I know it won’t fit in the overheads (and I have a smaller bag at that!). Whats this? 40 minute delay? Leaving me 5 minutes to make my connection? Not good, I continued to do my research and checked back later. 50 minute delay, now I’m missing my connection. Well the podium worker at the new gate arrived and I asked him if the 50 minutes was real and he said “Yup!” and very politely told me he was trying to figure everything out and he would let me know.

A few minutes later the intercom squawks with the announcement…. “The flight is delayed until 5pm (it supposed to depart around 1:40, not 40 minutes or 50 minutes but 3+ hours!)”. A chorus of gasps was heard from the passengers waiting that flight. The intercom continued “I’m working on getting every one to alternate flights so you can make your connections. Please don’t ask questions as I’m working as quickly as I can to get you on the flights. I’ll call you up as I know something”.

Surprisingly everyone basically went “Okay, not big deal” and they went back to their books, laptops, naps or conversations. Of course I turned to my laptop to start looking up what the other flight options were. A fellow traveler was also heading to BUF so we started talking about the options. A female passenger wanted to see what her options were for getting to her destination. “Too bad, we won’t be able to get this flight thats boarding now” I said to the other gentleman heading to BUF. The intercom squawks again “Any passengers traveling to Buffalo with unchecked bags please come to the podium”. We both jumped up and made a bee line to the podium. “Gate A23 now (we were in A24)”. A23 was one of the flights that should have already been boarded and pushing back. We get there, and they are working on their last standbys when they handle putting us on the plane. “Here’s your new flight number and gate” the worker said. “We will fix your ticket in route. Your boarding pass with be at the new gate.”

Sweet! The new flight was getting us out of RDU ahead of schedule and was still going to get us into BUF just a few minutes afterwards. I wonder about the other 60 or so people who were still stuck in RDU hoping to catch a connection, but for me, I’m movin’ on.

Short flight to Philly instead of DCA with a most friendly flight attendant. A Joy to talk to. “What a flight attendant has time to talk?” Apparently the flight was too short to do drinks, so they only did them on request. I felt somewhat cheated out of my half a glass of Sprite, but it was okay, the FA’s conversation was worth it (and everyone who wanted a drink got one!). Now I should say that this FA did me a big favor. Being the next to last one on the new flight meant I didn’t have any overhead room left (and it wouldn’t fit anyway and they had already closed the cargo hold) and I had my two carry ons and only one would go under the seat. She found a hole to shove it in. I was pleased!

The landing in PHL was near perfect. You could hardly feel the landing instead of the normal big bump. Kudo’s to the pilots!

Short stroll from B2 to C24 and I’m ready for my outbound flight. Philly street pretzels in hand I get to the gate and my boarding pass was ready. My original seats for both flights was 3D, an aisle seat with overhead storage. I would be one of the first on the plane, I was all set. Through the chaos of all the flight changes, first the bump and second the re-route, they managed to keep me in rows 2 and 3 and I was in the larger Embraer 175 instead of the the 145 which has much more comfortable seats, bigger windows, and more importantly bigger overhead bins!

All in all, we were early into Buffalo, but I was about 40 minutes later than I had planned. Not bad given the reroute. I do want to say that today US Airways handled everything as best they could and managed the big delay at least for me in a favorable way. I fly United a lot and I can tell you this. The experience would have been far different. I would have been met with rudeness and arrogance. I would have gotten no “Love” from them. I think US Airways is far superior to United in the Customer Service area!

Touch down in BUF, make my way to pick up my bag (I gate checked it in Philly because it was still going to be too tight a fit any way) then to the rental car agency. Now I try to do most of my business rentals with National. They have always been good to me. I’m an Emerald Isle member so I can just run get the car and take care of my signout at the exit gate. So I bop over to deal with the person at the exit gate. She can’t find my reservation. (Again, a very nice person to deal with!). I pull out my itinerary printed from nameless online travel services. And low and behold there is no car rental listed. Now I know I reserved one. “No problem, we have plenty” she said as she took care of setting me up on the spot. Now I’m panicked a bit. Did I rent with someone else? Did I rent at all? Or did said online travel service drop it (they recently did some upgrades!).

Zipped from BUF to the Hotel with no problems. Got checked in, reasonably nice place (Adam’s Mark for the curious). I hop on line to figure out what happened to the car. Either it did get dropped or I didn’t rent it. Given that I didn’t do the hotel through the service I’m thinking its my fault since its always Flight, Hotel, Car and with me not doing the hotel part, I probably never went back to take care of the car.

But amazingly enough. With a Bump, a huge delay, resulting in a re-route, a forgotten car rental, I’m at my destination with minimal headache and hassle.

Thank you travel service workers for making this horrid travel day actually work out pretty much as planned. And thank you to all the travelers who now go “Okay, whatever, it will work out” for not making out travel service work’s lives miserable.

Somehow the system just works.

I love the Keys. In fact, I had the pleasure of living in Key West for 6 years in the ’90s. The Keys, for those who don’t know, are a long chain of islands extending out into the Atlantic south of Miami and Fort Myers in Florida. The chain of islands is connected by the “Overseas Highway” or US-1 which starts at the heart of downtown Key West and passes through the islands up the east coast to Ft. Kent, Maine.

“Islands” is really a misnomer for the Keys. In most cases, they are just dead coral reef growth with Mangrove trees making up the bulk of the “Island”. In many cases, a given island might just be a block of coral and mangrove with a cement road running down the middle. Of course there are tons of resources that describe the Keys.

This trip involves me traveling to Key Largo and Taveriner to train. One of the great things about the keys are the sunsets. Its almost a religion in the Keys. Every visitor has to take in sunset at least once. So one of my goals for this trip was to capture a sunset.

With a threat of rain all week (normal for the Keys) I was hoping to get a decent sunset. The problem would be finding a location to shoot from. I decided to eat dinner at the Islamorada Fish Company which is on Florida Bay aide of the keys. Great choice, they had a nice palm tree laden micro-beach with a couple of boat docks and tiki-torches to view sunset from.

With around 100 people milling around, getting a shot with just the landscape was going to be impossible. But as the sun headed for a mangrove island on the horizon, we were treated to a lovely sunset.

Right until the sun’s disc neared the horizon.

A build up of clouds at the horizon filtered the sun’s light to a point where it was a faint orange circle. Many people were disappointed at not seeing the final act but overall it was a wonderful experience.

Travel has become somewhat second nature to me recently. My “day-job” as a Product Trainer has me traveling to various cities across the United States fairly frequently.

As such I’ve gotten pretty comfortable moving through the US airline system, at least until May when many states will fail to meet the federal RealID system, of which North Carolina is one that may not comply, which could bring my travels to a screeching shot until I can get a passport. (Update, NC got their extension in. I’m good so far!)

“What you don’t have a passport?” My travel has been limited to the US and occasionally Canada and I’ve not needed to go to Canada since passports have been required.

I also pack my camera along with me. As you can from my web site, photography is a bit of a passion. I like to get shots from each city that I visit and share them with the internet community. Sometimes they will be arty, other times more traditional works.

So hopefully this blog will involve into antidotes from the road to go along with the photos and their discussions as well as give you plenty of ample opportunity to “discuss” the merits of traveling through the US travel system.