Morro Bay Photo Expo – A Quick Summary
I spent the weekend in Morro Bay along the central coast of California. There are worse places to spend a weekend.
The reason I was there was to participate in the Morro Bay Photo Expo. I went last year and enjoyed it, but this year passed my expectations by far.
There was a raffle to benefit the Morro Bay High School Photography Club. I put in my $20 for my five tickets and figured it was donation to a good cause. I ended up winning the top two prizes; a Tamarac Aero Speed 75 photo backpack AND I won a signed print from George Lepp. To top it off, I was wait-listed to get into the George Lepp master class. I got in.
If that wasn’t enough, the workshops were much better done than last year. Dean Sullivan talked about shooting as a pro. Mike Baird had a great tour on the water in and out of Morro Bay. Saturday afternoon/evening Howard Ignatius and crew treated us to a sunset shoot on the Morro Strand State Beach. Ok, the sunset wasn’t that good, but they brought in four horses and riders to photograph on the beach. It was a great opportunity.
One of the lessons I learned was to check your camera between shooting different types of shots. I started Saturday evening shooting five shot bracket for HDR. Then I went to shoot the horses and forgot to take the camera off of bracket mode. The result? I got one good shot, two decent shots, and two unusable shots for every five I took. I couldn’t figure out why my flash wasn’t giving me consistent results and of course blamed the equipment. It wasn’t until later that I realized that, as usual, the equipment was great, but the operator was faulty. Scott Bourne put it best; 99% of the equipment is better than 98% of the photographers.
George Lepp gave a brand new five hour presentation on Saturday and followed it up on Sunday with a phenomenal master class for us lucky 15. We had six hours to pick one of the best photographic minds and discuss a wide variety of subjects including HDR, pano, pano-HDR (or HDR panos), use of a histogram, composition, and lots of other subjects. It was AWESOME!!!
Morro Bay Photo Expo on the Water Shooting
As usual, please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.
