
Gene Pardee from the Olympia Camera club shooting a Fresnel Lens
After we moved to Olympia a couple years ago I joined both a meetup.com photography group and the Olympia Camera Club. Over the last couple years I have gotten less active with the meetup.com group but more active with the camera club. One of the things that I find attractive about the camera club is the regularly scheduled photo field trips, one of which was this past weekend where we visited 3 different Puget Sound lighthouses. This image is from the Point Robinson light on Vashon Island and is of club member Gene Pardee shooting into the fresnel lens.
When I go on these sort of shoots, whether it is a field trip or just a photo walk, I am usually far less interested in actually making great images as I am with exploring somewhere I might not have been to before with a group of people that are seeing things differently than I do. The social aspect of a day like this is really what makes it fun, IMO.
This is my favorite image from the entire day. Granted, I have always been a sucker for images of photographers making images, but for me this image does a lot more to show that this trip was a club event, with other club members, having a good time and making some images along the way. There are a number of technical problems with this image, there are reflections from the glass, I was outside shooting into the light, but it is those little imperfections that actually makes this my favorite image from the day.
Ok, I guess I could have just made this blog post 1 sentence long and said “embrace the imperfections.”