Amongst the Cherry Blossoms
Plus: The decade-old cameras capturing the lunar flyby; a Senate bill for high-volume photographers; and DJI’s Pocket 4 specs.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with DC’s cherry blossoms lately. And while the core focus of my shooting at the Tidal Basin is mostly to give visitors a realistic visual sense of what to expect when they visit on any given day, it’s such a fun challenge to come up with something different and new each day I’m there. To keep my readers’ interest, but also my own. Because I can assure you, it’s not always picture-postcard perfect, especially in the early-morning hours when I’m usually there.
Sometimes I’m more successful than others. Sometimes the light or the weather is just flat as flat can be. Or it’s cold and windy. Sometimes I’m just not feeling it. But sometimes everything comes together nicely — light, weather, and cherry blossoms. And it’s fun and satisfying when that happens.
Today’s photos are some that I’ve taken of this year’s bloom (you can see some from previous blooms here).
Because I’m trying to provide a realistic view to my readers in near-daily updates, and they’re included in same-day posts, I’m coming at this with a quite different objective than most of the other photographers who head down to the Tidal Basin — and there are a lot of them during the season.
I want to provide my readers with a “this is what it looks like right now” approach. I shoot almost exclusively hand-held, better to be able to move around quickly and capture different perspectives from as much of the Tidal Basin as possible in a short period of time. Little to no processing or cropping. I shoot RAW, so some basic processing is non-negotiable, but I steer clear of things like the saturation slider and the fancy AI removal tools that image editing apps are getting flooded with. Occasionally, I have some fun with some pre-dawn BYO lighting just for kicks. But for me, the fun is in the challenge of the capture, not in the processing. To use whatever’s laid on by nature on-site, not what my computer can do.
The cherry blossom bloom is over now, so it’s on to some other fun projects.
Gear Updates
Sony is suspending sales of its memory cards. That includes their CFexpress Type A, Type B, and SD cards, due to the global shortage of semiconductors for flash memory. For a while, Sony was the only prominent maker of CFexpress Type A (which high-end Sony cameras use), but other manufacturers have since stepped up.
Pocket power. DJI is launching a tiny but high-spec gimbal camera. The DJI Pocket 4 has a 1-inch sensor, 14 stops of dynamic range, 10-bit D-Log, and 107GB internal storage. While it’s more relevant to influencers and on-the-ground journalists than photographers, it’s becoming a legitimate B-cam for pros, not just a vlogging gadget.
Photographers at Work
Fly me to the moon. The Artemis II astronauts are shooting with some interesting cameras. From inside the capsule, they’re using Nikon D5 DSLRs (released 2016). (For future lunar landing missions they’ll take Nikon Z9s. Apparently, the long record of rock-solid reliability, low noise, and high dynamic range was the deciding combination. And mounted to the outside are four specially modified GoPros for streaming the moon flyby. Again, not the latest models — these are the old GoPro HERO4 Blacks (released 2014).
There’s a wonderful collection of the Artemas II photos here. Reminds me of a slim but fascinating book I read a while back: Hasselblad and the Moon.
Wide Angle
All-you-can-eat copyright registrations? There’s a new copyright bill before the Senate that could be great for photographers who file their images with the Copyright Office. The current limit is 750 images per $55 filing fee. The new bill, known as the Visual Artists Copyright Reform Act (VACRA), proposes an annual flat rate for unlimited submissions (broken up into a max of 3,000 images per submission).
Tests suggest Google’s AI Overviews tells millions of lies per hour. And this. I won’t rant, but yeah . . .
Gorgeous blooms and so well shot.
Very interesting text and beautiful photos. Please extend your comprehensive reach into the events in the metropolitan area to celebrate the nation's 250th year.