Photo tour

My wife, Cindy, is an avid photographer. She has taken classes at the Cape Cod Conservatory and just loves taking pictures - especially of our kids and our cats (and the dog when he cooperates). She signed us both up for a wonderful program called A Photo Tour of the Heritage Museums and Gardens. Heritage Museums and Gardens is a 100 acre site is located in Sandwich, MA and has gardens, nature trails, a classic automobile collection, art exhibits, a working vintage carousel and many other attractions. They are famous for their rhododendron collection. But we were there to learn more about photography.

Our teacher, Jim Pennypacker of the Photography Center of Cape Cod, started out by giving us a number of useful tips that aren't covered by (and often contradict) the advice given in the Kodak manual. The first technique he taught us was "shooting through". That's where you have an irregularly shaped object in the foreground and out of focus and the subject of the picture is in focus in the background. The foreground object blurs and gives a hint of color to the object in the background. The top photo is my poor attempt at doing that. I should have picked a foreground object that wasn't white. It just looks like a mistake. As with all of these pictures, to expand them, just click on the picture.

Jim then took us to the carousel where, luckily, a school class was taking a field trip so the carousel was kept busy spinning. Our assignment here was to widen our shutter speed and follow our subject as the carousel rotated and then take the picture. In this way, the subject stays relatively in focus while the rest blurs to highlight the subject. As you can see, I'm starting to get the idea but I have a lot of work to do.

As we walked around, we saw a new part of the gardens called Hidden Hollow. It's designed for children and they are drawn to the tree house pictured here. It's amazing to be walking along and then suddenly see this magical looking place as if a fairy cast a spell and allowed you to see something only children would normally see. It looks like something out of The Hobbit.

We ended up in the automobile gallery where beautifully maintained cars from the early part of the Twentieth Century are housed. Our assignment here was to deal with the low light conditions (no flash) and to isolate parts of the cars. Anyone can take a picture of the entire car but we were to take a picture of a part of the car with no interfering lines or obstructions from other parts of the car. My camera had a hard time in the low light conditions. My only two useful pictures came when I was looking at light colored cars. The first is a picture of the graceful lines of a Duesenberg fender. As you can see, I didn't really do it right because the straight line of the hood and the edge of the headlight interfere with the beautiful curves of the fender and hood vents.

My final picture is of the side of the hood of a Cord automobile. I thought the car itself quite ugly but the streamlined shapes and the reflection of the fins on the fender are very interesting (to me).

We had a wonderful time. It's always exciting to learn new things plus the day was beautiful. But it was also nice for Cindy and I to spend some time together where we weren't trying to solve problems or make other people happy. We were able to just enjoy each other's company. And now we've got some things to work on to improve our photography. We can help each other as we each remember different things from our wonderful day together.