Backcountry

While my wife was shopping in the visitor center for the Pelindaba Lavender Farm on San Juan Island, JCO and I found some time to explore and play around in the grounds and take some photographs. The lavender was nice, but I actually found the the old wooden fence and natural back country growth around the perimeter of the farm more photographically appealing.   

Its been really tough photographing JCO at this age.  Whenever the camera is pointed at him he either avoids eye contact, sticks his tongue out, or clowns around in some other silly way. The challenge is to time the shutter in between his antics or while his is distracted by something behind me or off in the distance. Another way I've found to be somewhat successful is to play along with his game and laugh along with him. In those moments of mutual laughter, I'll try to keep steady and grab a shot.

After spending the so much time lately shooting pictures with my iPhone, I finally decided to drag out my old and heavy (relatively speaking) DSLR and lug it around on this day. Although I've been quite happy with the results of the iPhone, and the ease of capturing, editing and uploading the images with it, I had almost forgotten the advantages of a larger sensor and telephoto lens has over any point-and-shoot or cell phone cameras; mainly, depth of field. Even though the pictures above were shot with a "slow" Tamron 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 lens, I'm able to still get decent bokeh when racking out to >70mm, getting closer to the subject, and keeping the subject farther from the background.