Hand Coding

My friend (and coworker) Matt recently adopted a baby daughter, Gracie, and asked Michelle and I if we would take a few family portraits at the Dallas Arboretum. This was right about the time of the yearly “Dallas Blooms” festival (where the Arboretum plants shedloads of flowers) and we just couldn’t pass that up. So, we headed down to the Arboretum one Saturday morning earlier this month and took a handful of posed and candid shots of Matt and his family.

As it turns out, I had just recently bought my Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens and this presented a great opportunity to put it to use. I stuck with the lens throughout the morning and I was really pleased with how things turned out. Admittedly, the focal length took a little getting used to — I had to remain about 20 ft away from the subjects even for sitting-in-the-grass types of shots. It wasn’t long, though, before it all became second nature.

Oh, one last thing — in the photo set on Flickr, you’ll see some shots from Michelle and some from me; as you might guess, the ones labeled “Photo by Alex” are the ones that I took.

Michelle and I went down to the Dallas Arboretum over Chocolate Rabbit Day for their recent Dallas Blooms event. During the event (which runs March 8 – April 13 this year), the Arboretum plants a whole heapful of flowers:

Dallas Blooms will feature more than 400,000 spring-blooming bulbs, over 3,000 azaleas and thousands of another annuals and perennials spread throughout the 66-acre garden. The 2008 festival is a fun-filled five-week, six-weekend event and is the largest outdoor floral festival in the Southwest.

I had a hard time getting shots, in part because the only lens I had at the time was Canon’s 50mm f/1.4. (I now also have Canon’s 85mm f/1.8, but as it would happen, that isn’t exactly great for landscapes either.) It’s a great lens in general, don’t get me wrong, but with the 40D’s 1.6x crop factor, that 50mm lens had an equivalent focal length of an 80mm lens on a traditional full-frame SLR.

So, while it may have been a normal lens on a full-frame camera (that is, a lens with a magnification roughly equal to that of the human eye), I was dealing with a somewhat telephoto lens. And, for landscape photography (where wide-angle lenses are often the lens of choice), it felt a bit like trying to hit balls into the outfield with a Wiffle bat. All things considered, I’m pleased with how these shots came out.