An Apology to Gypsies and My Failure at The Lady of the Lakes Renaissance Faire

In November of 2007, I took my digital camera to the Lady of the Lakes Renaissance Faire to photograph what, to this day, is one of Real Florida Photo’s most popular galleries. A year later, I went back. This time armed with several of the best manual focus 35mm film bodies ever produced and tons of film. The performers were fantastic, the patrons looked great in costume, the vendors were spot on and in character, the shows, mock battles, and tournaments were funny and dramatic. At the end of the day I had gone through about $200 worth of film and processing. Well worth it. It was a great day. I could not wait to see my results. This would go down as one of my best days of shooting ever.

The film came back from the developer and each and every photograph I took that day was…awful.

Who is to blame? The harsh midday light of Florida on a sunny day?

Afraid I can’t do that. Shooting in the blinding glare of the Florida sunlight is old hat to me. A lot of my best pictures have been taken in this light. Like a pro baseball player who has been catching pop-fly’s since he could walk, “The sun was in my eyes” is not a legitimate excuse. I know the drill: minus one to minus two stops on my old film cameras in bright sunlight. More than that, I’ve shot this event before and with a lot better results.

Maybe blame the kid at the photography counter at Colonial Photo & Hobby? Now that is tempting. My return to film photography was recent and he was the one that handed me those ten boxes of film in the first place.  I had gone there asking for a print film that, “gives saturated colors like a slide film.”

He said that’s not really available. Then he hesitated. He finally shrugged “welllll…this one is close.”

Aaaaand, I trusted him.

Bad move to take advice from a kid who wants to get you out of the way so he can peddle more digital cameras.

Still, I know better than to trust the kid at the counter at this alleged “Pro” lab. Don’t get me started on my experiences with them.

Finally, I realized there is only one factor in this equation I can blame for such a catastrophy.  In the time honored tradition of photographers since 1892 there is only one thing that can be blamed when taking bad photographs.

The Eastman Kodak Company.

What?

You didn’t think I was going to say me did you?  Oh please.

To give blame where blame is due I blame Kodak for producing Ultra Color 100UC. Sure I had bright spots and shaded spots in the harsh mid day sun in my original shoot of the Renaissance Faire. This time it was SO MUCH worse: Blown out highlights and, otherwise, too dark darks. No way for a happy medium between the two.

What hurt the most, was this series getting away.

Here’s what happened:

The Flogging Drummers Began to Drum

The Gypsies Danced and Danced

…and the dark areas were too dark and the bright areas were too bright and there was not enough in the middle to make a cohesive photograph. I have over a dozen or so great photographs of gypsies dancing and they all look like this. It would have been one of my favorite series ever, if I had only shot it on another film.

When I said I wanted a film that acted like slide film, I did not mean all of the bad aspects of slide film, particularly blown out highlights, with none of the good. Print film should have more range than slide film. I swear the Kodak UC line had less.

Here’s the shot that hurts the most though. It would have been one of my all time favorites. Instead, it’s a white over-exposed mess. Like a fisherman talking about the big one, this will forever be, “the one that got away” to me:

Gypsies Pose for the "Faerie Box"

They say a photographer should never make excuses. I researched this film after the fact and several photographers have warned to never use this films outdoors. Yes, I should have looked into it ahead of time. Would  have been nice to know that earlier. Would have been nice of the “Pros” at Colonial Photo and Hobby gave me that vital little tidbit of information before I burned a dozen rolls in the midday sun though.

Things have changed. Kodak has released a new film that is as miraculous as 100UC is, well, whatever it is.  It is called Ektar 100 and I can’t imagine using anything else in that range. I apologize to gypsies, royalty and knaves. To flogging drummers, jesters, the most noble of royalty down to the washing well wenches. This year, I’ll be ready.

2009 Chiefland Watermelon Festival

“Look at ‘em. You can’t just eat away at the watermelon…”

“…you’ve got to bury your face down in there, right down to the rind…”

“…like that one there! He’s got the idea!”

And so the narration went from two older gentlemen standing behind me as I photographed The Chiefland Watermelon Festival’s watermelon eating contest. That passionate sports casting alone was well worth the over two hour drive.

It had started on a whim. As you can see from my site, I have plenty of photographs of Florida.  Upon closer examination, you may notice that these photographs are mainly from Mount Dora and neighboring towns. My site was not named “Real Mount Dora Photo”, or “Central Florida Photo” though. It was named Real Florida Photo and though my home town and surrounding area is beautiful enough for a lifetime of photography,  it bothered me that I had not taken many photographs of the “real” Florida far from home.

One night I announced to my wife, Jennifer, that I wanted to begin photographing different aspects of Florida’s agriculture since that has been such a big part of Florida’s economy and identity for most of the history of the state. It’s not easy being married to an aspiring photographer.  After finding out what was currently in season (watermelon) Jennifer found out the Chiefland Watermelon Festival was coming up in two weeks and the plan was set to attend.

We drove across some of the most beautiful countryside and farmland I have ever seen on that rainy morning. The view on the drive would have been worth a photography excursion itself  but I did not want to miss the parade.

The Parade was a lot of fun and, of course, had enormous small-town charm. There was an armada of John Deere Tractors.

There were Little Watermelon Queen Contestants

There were bloodhounds barking at the crowd.

There were barefoot Watermelon Queen contestants.

There were the Chiefland All Stars

Watermelon Queen Contestants Throwing Candy

There was a Little King of Watermelons

More Watermelon Queen Contestants throwing candy (though I believe this one may be a reigning queen)

The throwing of candy was a huge hit with the kids. They really ran for it. Halloween in June!

There was a funny vehicle that was loud…

…and did crazy spins and wheelies.

Plus, there were more Watermelon Queen contestants…

…perfecting their classic beauty queen parade-waves to the crowd.

By the way, have I mentioned yet that Watermelon beauty queen contestants and reigning beauty queens were featured prominently in the Chiefland Watermelon Festival Parade? That’s because one of the main events of the Chiefland Watermelon Festival is to crown the new Chiefland Watermelon Queen…and I missed it! I dragged my wife out of bed on a day off before sunrise, drove for over two hours and STILL do not know who the reigning watermelon queen is.

One thing that I did not miss was the abundant free watermelon, provided by local farmers, that was everywhere. It was good. I was telling some co-workers about the festival and they complained that the watermelon was not good in Florida. This watermelon was. Watermelon was free to everyone attending the festival and, when I say everyone…

…I mean everyone.

One of the highlights for me was the Watermelon auction. I do not believe I have ever seen a real auctioneer live before and this gentleman was amazing. With machine gun rapid speach he sold prize winning watermelon to local business owners and politicians.

Of course there was plenty of fantastic food including fried alligator tail and award-winning barbecue. I’m afraid I had to have both.

There was a watermelon seed-spitting contest but it was hard to get good photographs of this. Watermelon seed-spitting is not an action-packed sport and you kind of had to have been there. I was bummed out they did not have the greased-pole climbing contest and hope they bring it back.

There were also activities for the kids.

If you are looking to visit one of the most beautiful parts of the state and would like to experience rural Florida and meet warm, friendly people, Chiefland Watermelon Festival boasts small town charm at its best.  Of course, the watermelon can’t be beat.

Winner! 2009 Chiefland Watermelon Eating Contest.

Picture of the Day: The Last Seven Gallery

I have had complaints that I don’t update my site enough. This stems from two problems.
The first is that I am trying to make the site less cluttered and more easy to navigate so that interested visitors can immediately get to the good photographs they want to see.
The second problem is, well, I don’t update my site enough.
For regular visitors, and to encourage more regular visitors, I have created a gallery called The Last Seven. It is a slide show where a new photograph is posted daily every day of the week. Once the following week rolls around, that photograph is replaced by a new photograph. This means seven new photographs per week.

Some are from the archives and, though I liked them and thought they were good, they were just not quite good enough to make the final cut. Many are new pictures I have taken recently.

Click HERE to visit this gallery and come back often because it completely changes every week!

Amigo! Alligator! Tales of a World Full of Art Directors

You step outside your door, camera in hand, prepared to acquire the ultimate capture; a photograph to set the visual arts world on fire. You are not alone. The world is simply brimming with art directors.

Usually these helpful advisors take the form of small children that either

1) Think your time, effort, and film are much better spent photographing them and perhaps their friends acting goofy or

2) “I want to try it.” because, though your hundreds of dollars of photography equipment looks extremely cool, it is very boring watching you use it when they could be looking cool peering through the viewfinder and pressing the  button to hear the satisfying click of the shutter snapping.

There are plenty of adult artistic directors too.  On a recent shoot in Lake Eola Park in Orlando, Florida, I had  half a dozen homeless people, that previously were simply hanging out in the park for the day,  acting as consultants excitedly telling me where all the swan’s nests were and where the cutest newborn critters could be found. 

When I first made the switch from digital photography back to film, one of the major items on my ‘to do’ list was (and still is) to get the definitive image of an Alligator. Since I was able to understand the English language and the inevitable “what do you want to be when you grow up?” question, I would proudly respond, ” A paleontologist!” As many young children who give that answer to that question, I did not really want to learn the extensive knowledge of Latin or spend my days under the brutal desert sun unearthing, one speck of sand at a time, a dinosaur skeleton with a delicate brush which are several of the real required geological disciplines for that profession. I wanted to be amidst the gnashing teeth and blasting volcanoes of our planet’s violent past.

Therefore, I was very excited to end up in Floirda where the backdrop of exotic foliage looked, to me, like the scene from a favorite Smithsonian Institution poster of when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and there were enormous reptiles still roaming the landscape.

Alligators are tough, though. They’re common in the deep south. There’s tons of photographs of them. Still, the siren to an aspiring photographer, is that there are not so many good photographs of them. To photograph an alligator is not enough. I’m trying to get the definitive photograph of one of these beasts. Something with visual interest in the foreground, and maybe the background, that makes you want to say, now there is an alligator.

I’m still working on getting this shot.

One evening at sunset, on the shores of Lake Dora, I was close. it was a beauty lounging on the shores; nearly twelve foot long. 

(S)he was in my sights. There were cattails and tall Florida swamp grass in the foregroung, the gently lapping waves in the background. In the viewfinder of my Pentax ME Super was the perfect composition painstakingly taking shape. 

While crouching behind my tripod peering through the viewfiner, I heard the exclamation, “Amigo!” yelled with a thick spanish accent.

“Amigo!”

“Hey Amigo!”

“Amigo!!!“

Finally this increasingly urgent exclamation from the man behind me annoyed the beautiful specimen of an Alligator sending it to swim to another shore.

I slowly turned to glare at whoever was yelling, to see a hispanic man pointing excitedly now that I was finally paying attention to him.

“Alligator!” he exclaimed grinning from ear to ear and gesturing at the retreating beast.

I turned back to the reptile and clicked off a shot of this huge specimen swimming  across Lake Dora with the sun setting in the background.

It is one of the better pictures I have taken.

To all the armchair artistic directors who have pointed me in the right direction on what I should photograph:

Thanks Amigo.

You’re Too Stupid to Own A DSLR

There’s an old joke. An urban legend, actually, that originated on the internet over a decade ago. It’s about a computer tech-support specialist who gets a call from a particularly frustrating customer. The customer can not get his computer to work. After a series of questions, to which the customer gives obtuse answers, the computer tech finally finds out that the customer is in a power outage and that this is the real reason his computer won’t work. Not a technical difficulty. The computer tech instructs the customer to re-package his computer and take it back to the store he got it from.

The customer asks, “Is it really that bad”?

“I’m afraid so.” Replies the computer tech.

“Well, all right then, I suppose. What should I tell them?”

“Tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.”

If you have never read this, you can find  a version of it in its entireity here.

I thought about this story a lot about a year ago.

I loved my digital single lens reflex camera (DSLR camera) so much, I suspect my wife was becoming  jealous of it. As those of you who own one already know, one of the biggest annoyances and greatest causes of neurosis on a DSLR is dust on the sensor.  The sensor is what used to be a frame of film but is now an insanely delicate small panel that captures the light/image that comes through the lens and records the information as a photograph.

The tiniest speck of dust, nearly invisible to the human eye, can show up as unsightly blackish-gray blobs on the final image. This was not a problem for one happy year of constant use of my camera. I only had two zoom lenses: one for wide shots, one to get closer to the action. I changed them rarely. It wasn’t until I began using prime (which are fixed focal length) lenses that this problem emerged again and again. The only thing worse than dust on your slr sensor is wet dust and, Florida being one of the more humid places in the world, their is nothing dry about anything as soon as you set foot out of your air-conditioned abode.

Every time you change a lens, a big benefit of owning an slr instead of a fixed-lens camera like a point and shoot, you expose it to this potential dust. In a state that is made up of sand floating on an aquifer, dust is inevitable.

The dust became so bad, I finally sent it back to the camera company (no longer under warranty) and they were kind enough to return my camera with a new sensor for the modest cost of $265.  Really, why tell your customers they’re stupid when you can charge them $265?

My camera came back so clean and new looking, I first suspected they replaced the entire thing. I enjoyed the use of my like-new camera for…one day. I was at a festival. I was by a lake. It was windy. After photographing people at the event with the zoom I had on the camera’s body, I looked at cat tails and tall grass by the lake and really wanted to take some fine art photograph’s of it with my 50mm/1.4 prime. I wanted to so badly I, you guessed it, switched my lens under the worst possible conditions.

Having twenty years experience as a shop craftsman for my day job, I’ve made pieces like a specialty cabinet or podium, so fine in their detail, so elegant in their design,  that they cost major corporations  tens of thousands of dollars. I’ve worked on sets and other projects for the themed entertainment and convention industries that have delighted, by now, millions of people. I make my living from working materials to perfection and eliminating the slightest flaws.  Certainly I was smart enough to clean my own camera’s sensor.

Wrong.

I tried blowers. I tried wands. Some showed little improvement. Some made the problem even worse. That dust became, to me, that infernal pink ring in Dr. Seuss’  The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.

Finally, in desperation, I looked across the room to see the computer owner’s weapon of choice: a can of condensed air. Oh yeah. That would definitely blast that pesky dust off of that sensor. I know you DSLR owners out there are cringing. I know you see that red circle with a slash through it neatly framing my Office Depot can of Cleaning Duster air. Hey, don’t worry. Look back up on my credentials as a craftsman. Just one quick blast and I’ll have the surface of that sensor cleaned good. There’s only one pesky speck of dust left. One quick blast and this terrible problem is gone for good.

Yeah.

What happened was I managed to blast a hair between the sensor cover and the sensor itself.

Yep, that’s right. Second sensor ruined.

That’s when I thought of the computer tech. I could just hear him saying, “You’re too stupid to own a DSLR”.

Ahh, the memory of the look on my wife’s face when I explained that I got one day’s use out of my $265 sensor but that it’s ruined again.

I thought of my first camera and how it was over thirty years old and worked great. I thought about film and how, though it does not have a lot of the conveniences of a modern DSLR, how the look of a film print blows digital out of the water.

I hit EBay and bought three camera bodies and four of the better prime lenses ever made for less than I would have paid for another sensor.

Now I’m making friends with film. It’s a lot harder to use, but it’s worth it. There’s a depth to the photography that digital, much as I loved it, can not capture. My photographs will be better than they ever could have been with digital for a myriad of reasons. Maybe that’s not so stupid after all.

The New Gear

Complete with knitted “lens condoms” courtesy of my wife, Jennifer

 

4th Annual Eustis Sunlove Festival

Last Sunday we swung by Eustis to attend the Sunlove Festival which celebrates wholistic health, healing, art and music…and belly dancers!

We arrived just as the children’s dance troupe Yoga Motion was taking a bow.

Next up was Amy Anthony and students from her Belly Dance and Yoga studio AUM.

Being in Ferran Park in full sunlight, there were a lot of challenges with this shoot but, there was a lot working for me too. Typical for Florida, the sun beat down white-hot.  This day was a little different in that there was lots of wind and clouds in the sky adding to the drama of this passionate dance form. I had a lot of challenges with busy backgrounds and people who detracted from the main subjects.

Still, since it was a smaller festival, we concentrated a lot on this performance and captured some of my favorite shots that I have taken.

Another of my favorites from this series was actually going to be a throwaway. This dancer looks great and is striking a nice pose. I like tight cropping but the cropping on this photograph, cutting off her feet and her hands, is a poorly composed photograph. I liked it because of the powerful pose and I was sitting cross-legged in the front row and looking up at her.

I played with the photograph, cropping it severely and turning it to black and white film with an orange filter. Now it looks reminiscent of a fashion photograph to me. I’m happy with the results though I wish that one palm frond was not right next to her face.

Jennifer attended a Yoga Class held by yoga instructor John Colvin.

John said he had a stroke at age 55 that left him paralyzed on his left side. His doctors told him “get used to it, this is how it’s going to be.”

He was on a ton of different medications. Then John began taking Yoga classes and began regaining his mobility. He also stopped taking his medications. He would go to the doctor for checkups and the doctor would say, “Stay on this medicine. It’s working!” and would write him another prescription that John did not get filled. John indicated he had a pile of prescriptions one inch thick that remain unfilled.

Today he has about 99% mobility in his body.

John states, “If you can breathe, you can do yoga.”

The festival was held by Lake Eustis and the scene was very laid back with people discussing everything from crystals to cardiovascular health with various vendors.

One lady was blowing bubbles that floated through the festival while others were just relaxing and hanging out enjoying the beautiful day by the lake.

For the kids, there was one of those big inflatable air castles and, really, what says wholistic health and healing more than an inflatable air castle? It was a huge hit.

Shortly after the Belly Dance Troupe left the stage, the oldies band The Lost Cats came on and began to play.  They did great covers of a lot of classics.  The belly dancers were milling about off to the side when the lead singer finally said, “I see you over there bouncing and clanging those bells. I know you wanna dance. Get on out on that floor!”

A couple of them did and the bassist lept off the stage and played while dancing with them on the dance floor.

Next year, if you are interested in wholistic health and spirituality or, if you just want a nice day in the park with food and great music, and hopefully Belly Dancing, The Eustis SunLove Festival is highly recommended.

Pentax SMCP-FA 50mm f/1.4 AF and a windy day in Florida

At the time my camera died, I had just purchased a new lens. It was a prime lens. For non-photography folks there are two basic types of lenses in photography: Primes and Zooms.

A zoom lens is one where you can “zoom” in and out to make the subject closer or farther away. Even most point and shoots have these and they are great for capturing fleeting moments where you would not be able to catch the action and frame the picture the way you want it before the subject moves on to something else.

A prime lens is a “Fixed Focal Length” lens meaning, if you want your subject closer, start walking forward. The benefit of a prime lens is that, since you don’t need planes of glass inside the lens body to zoom in and out, there is less glass between the image sensor/film to distort the picture. Plus, they can (typically) be opened to a wider aperture to shoot faster in low light to avoid blur. I could have really used a prime lens for the Leesburg Now and Then Christmas Parade.

I have been excited to try my new prime. It is a classic Pentax lens. This version being the SMCP-FA 50mm f/1.4 AF.

I knew it would be good but I had no idea it would be this good.

Last Sunday was a hot but very windy day here in Florida. When I took my camera out into the world it felt moody to me. Sort of a Wuthering Heights type of look and feel to it. There is an old abandoned house that I have been meaning to photograph for a while now. It sits in an orange grove and typifies the rapidly changing landscape of Florida to me. It seemed like a great day and a great subject to put my new lens to the test on.

I took photos from dozens of different angles but settled on this one. The farmhouse fills most of the frame and this captured for me the melancholy of a way of life in Florida that has all but faded forever with an intimate “portrait” of this great home.

 

I then went down to Lake Dora which was very choppy. Though this photograph is in color, it has a black and white feel to it that I liked.

The lens disappeared so much for me that I felt the absorption of painting or playing an instrument instead of my often uptight composing and fiddling with settings. I can’t wait to use it more.

Coming up, I hope to attend the Sun Love Festival in Eustis this weekend. That is if my day job does not interfere. I hope to see some of you there.

~Morgan

People in Florida, Where I have been and my photography guru

For reasons too embarrassing to recount regarding my own attempt to repair my camera, followed by my camera being damaged further at a local repair shop, I have been away a long time. Actually I have been right here. My camera, however, took a lengthy journey to Colorado where it received serious surgery (they basically gutted it and started over) at the Pentax American Division.

Now it’s back, I’m back, and shooting with renewed vigor.  I did have my old Sony Mavica. Old in the camera world meaning a little over seven years. I really liked my Mavica. I used it to take some of my best pictures to date. It simply could not do what a DSLR (Digital Single Reflex Camera) can do. For outdoor shots, it was fantastic. It also documented my pets and home life quite well.

When attending an event like Florida MegaCon, though, I came home with several discs of blurred pictures. It was simply too dark and/or fast for my camera to perform like I wanted it to.

Not having my camera, I read about photography. That was how I came across Bill Brandt who quickly became my idol and favorite photographer. One of my favorite quotes about what art is was by Amiri Baraka who stated, “Art is something that makes you proud to be human.”

I have never seen a photographer accomplish this quite like Bill Brandt. He photographed people at all socio-economic levels from debutantes and celebrities to factory workers and school children with a reverence that makes them all equally delightful to see and wish you could meet. In a contemporary world where bright, glossy colors and tack-sharp focus are sought after as the holy grail of “good” photography, I found real genius in Brandt’s old black and white photographs with all their blur, grain and dark shadows bringing them to life in the way only a master of his calibre can.

Inspired by Brandt, knowing a Sony Mavica would be more than enough for such a master, I tried again and got one photograph I like enough to post on the site. This is Katy at The Frosty Mug restaurant in Mount Dora. She is my brother’s girlfriend who came down with him to visit and this is one of my favorite portraits. In post processing, it was altered to appear as a photo taken a hundred years ago.

I was further inspired by Brandt to do more “street” photography. I like events and festivals because they get people out of their homes and doing something fun but I have always liked street photography and realized I wanted to capture people more in their daily lives as well.

This photograph of Katy officially opens the People in Florida gallery where I look forward to photographing the great people we see and meet in this state.

Coming up next will be more black and white photographs I took with my new lens on a windy day in Florida.

~Morgan
 

 

Florida Animals

Hello again!

We have been gone far too long and it is so good to be back. In a nutshell, I have been gone because my camera has been gone in the shop for some serious repair. More on that later. For the short version, I will be getting a film camera as backup for the digital. Digital is great but, as I’ve learned over the past couple of months, it has its drawbacks.

To test my returned camera, we took some peanuts to Palm Island in Mount Dora. This squirrel was a great subject (as long as I kept feeding him peanuts).

This little guy (girl?) opens the Florida Animals gallery on our site.

Sorry we have been gone so long but, now that we are back, we’ll be updating and uploading more pictures often.

Talk to you soon!

Mermaids of Weeki Wachee

New Years is about keeping resolutions and one resolution Jennifer and I made together was to travel as much as possible to the iconic locations that make Florida unique in all of the world and photograph them.
First on that list was a small town of nine human residents that also is home to citizens unique to this location: Mermaids!

In 1946, former U.S. Navy Frog Man trainer Newton “Newt” Perry developed a system for breathing under water through a long hand-held air hose that allowed performers complete freedom of movement without the inhibition of scuba diving equipment.

He scouted locations in Florida to build his vision of a unique theatre where audience members could view performers underwater and found, off a dirt road amidst wild forest and farm land, the Weeki Wachee spring that feeds Weeki Wachee river.
On January sixth, we followed in the footsteps of Elvis, Don Knotts and generations of little girls from Florida and around the world who dreamed of one day being a Mermaid driving past orange groves across the beautiful Florida countryside to Weeki Wachee.The grounds are charming. Not the all out-assault to the senses of the major theme parks but beautifully landscaped grounds that hold outdoor theatres for animal shows, a dock where you depart for a boat tour down the river, and free-roaming peacocks. Across the river lies the brightly colored water park. We missed the animal show because we attended the two shows depicting what we went to see: Mermaids.

We knew the shows would be fun but we had no idea just how amazing it would be. The performers are as talented as they are beautiful being able to hold their breath for nearly three minutes and to dive 175 feet into a spring blasting water at the rate of 117 million gallons a day.

First we photographed The Little Mermaid Show based on the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.
The story ranged from cute with characters that included the Little Mermaid’s best friend Chester, the wisdomous deep sea turtle, to sentimental and romantic with this adaptation of a classic fairy tale.
Of course, the real draw for us was watching these phenomenal performers in their beautiful costumes swim and perform in this surreal underwater world.
Then we photographed Fish Tails: a salute to the history of Weeki Wachee and demonstrations on just what is required to be a mermaid.

When we got home after a great day (stopping along the way to get oranges from a local farmer, of course. It’s that time of year) I was excited to load all of our images from the SD cards to discover…uh…they’re all very blue. Blue skin, blue water, blue everything. At first I was worried about having cards full of images we could not use. I warmed the color temperatures up (viewing objects underwater completely drains them of all of their warm color. We are hardly the first photographer’s to run into this problem), converted some to black and white,  and what I thought was a day of missed shots quickly became some of our favorite photographs.
Many I warmed up just a tiny bit, bringing out some of the colors but keeping that blue underwater look.

Others I converted to black and white, using warm filters to give them a high-contrast nostalgic look. We’re thrilled with the results and hope you like them too.
If you live in Florida, or are visiting the state, do not miss this attraction. It is high on our list of favorites and a unique part of Florida’s history. Plus, it is important to show your support to these dedicated and talented performers. Weeki Wachee is having a hard time financially and it would be a terrible loss to Florida’s unique character if this attraction were to shut down.
In the mean time, enjoy the gallery and either email us or post your comments on individual photographs to let us know what you think.
~Morgan