Photography Meetup – Holland Ridge Tulip Farm Friday April 15

Tulips

The Tulips are finally going to peak and we’ll be there on Friday April 15 from Noon until 5 pm. 

Please purchase your tickets online on Holland Ridge Farm’s website before departing. Holland Ride Farm is located about 2 hours from Bergen County. Google Maps

Suggestions for this meetup
Paul Carretta will be on location from 12 pm – 5 pm to help guide you through taking great shots of the tulip fields.
Please purchase your tickets online in advance on the Holland Ridge Farm website
Macro and wide angle lenses recommended
You may be shooting at very low angles to make great photographs so do not wear dress clothes or shoes.
Low angle tripods, diffusors, and reflectors are also a good idea to bring along but not necessary
You are responsible for tickets to enter and getting yourself to the meetup

Questions? Please give the store a call.

Looking for Something to Do? Butterfly Fest Sunday 8/13

Butterfly Fest

Sunday August 13th

Noon – 3pm

Looking for something to do this weekend? Look no further than New Jersey’s own Botanical Garden. Visit the New Jersey Botanical Garden at Skylands, located in Ringwood, NJ on Sunday for their Butterfly Festival held by the Bergen County Audubon Society. Meet up at the Carriage House Visitor Center, to learn all about butterflies and how to attract them. Butterfly walks will also be led throughout the day. Guests will be able to walk through the Botanical Garden, and identify the butterflies that inhabit the area. 

The Botanical Garden at Skylands is also a great location for birding, and the 1117-acre property also includes a Tudor revival mansion built in the 1920s from stone quarried in the estate. Tours are led of the estate, and self-guiding tours are available of the grounds. Enjoy a stroll through history at the Skylands Botanical Gardens.

More information regarding this event and the Botanical Garden can be found on their website,  www.njbg.org/, as well as on https://www.mybergen.com/bergen-county-nj-events-entertainment-northern-new-jersey-plays-concerts-fundraisers-comedy/butterfl

 

Longwood Gardens Trip with Olympus and Frank T Smith May 7

Join Bergen County Camera and Olympus Trailblazer Frank Smith for a photo excursion to Longwood Gardens in Kennet Square, PA. Longwood Gardens is considered to be the World’s premier horticultural display garden.

The beautiful 1050 acre site features 20 outdoor gardens, 20 indoor gardens, spectacular fountains, and 11,000 different types of plants. Our trip is planned during the Garden’s Spring Blooms. With dogwoods, magnolias, wisterias, azaleas, foam-flowers, and more than 240,000 tulips, Spring Blooms creates a symphony of color like no other season. BCC staff will be available to assist you with your photography throughout the day. Tickets are $99 each and include pre trip class, transportation, admission and Saturday Focus Session Trip Review. We also have a full Macro Photography class scheduled for April 25th if you want to improve your skills before the trip. $50

 


All about Frank T. Smith 
At an early age (3 years old+/-) I developed a curiosity with photography. My grandfather, Frank Fehn was an avid photographer, always with his Leica camera in his hand and me by his side. He bought me a miniature replica 35mm camera which was the beginning of my life-long passion for photography.

Photography is my passion – both in taking the pictures as well as the post pro-cessing techniques that I use. I am an experienced traveler having had the op-portunity to photograph in places around the world. As a native of the northeast, I also enjoy the local scenery of the Pocono Mountains or urban decay and iconic subjects as well as historical sites such as the former Bethlehem Steel factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. My portfolio is diverse.

I use the Olympus Micro Four Thirds system. My workhorses are the Pro OM-D EM-1 Mark II and the EM-5 Mark II. I use the OM-D EM-10 Mark II for road trav-el and family events. I use a variety of different lenses based on the camera and type of shooting I am doing. My attraction with Olympus is two-fold; first the camera and lens quality and second, the weight and size. My post processing is done with Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop CC, and various plug-ins.

I am a member of the Olympus Visionary Program. Olympus Visionaries are es-tablished, award-winning professional photographers who travel the world with Olympus products to capture life’s beauty and splendor. The elite members of the program include several Pulitzer Prize–winning photographers, as well as artists whose careers have included assignments around the globe. Frank Smith Olym-pus Trailblazer

I believe photography is a constantly changing art form and as such I try to stay current by teaching workshops & classes every year. I exhibit my work in various galleries. Some of my recent exhibits include “Atacama – A Lunar Landscape”, “Near and Far” an 8 year compilation of India; “Bhutan – The Land of the Thunder Dragon”; “Allentown State Hospital – A Different View” and “The Birth of a Na-tion- South Sudan”. My work can be seen on my website at www.franksmithphotos.com or on my blog where I post my up to date work regu-larly at www.franktsmith.wordpress.com/. You can also follow me on Facebook. I was also published in Outdoor Photography (December 2013) and presented a Ted Talk in 2013 titled Looking thru the Lens -Vocation vs. Avocation. In November 2015, PBS did the following interview with me.

Free Saturday Focus Sessions – March – April

Focus sessions are free and take place in the Westwood store from 9:30 am – 10 am. All sessions will allow for questions and answers. Please bring your camera and any images along that you have questions about. Feel free to use the comment option to make suggestions for future focus sessions.

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Hit the “Like Button” to let your friends know. Have suggestions for future focus sessions? Feel free to leave a comment. (Comments actually work now!)

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Here’s our upcoming Focus Sessions:

March 1 – Decorating with Photography

March 8 – Flash Photography

March 15 – Time Exposures

March 22 – Critique Your Photos

March 29 – Walk About Westwood

April 5 – Sensor Cleaning

April 12 – Phone Photography / Apps

April 19 – Great Landscape Photographs

April 26 – Flower Photography

These are free events – bring a friend along if you’d like. Share with your friends on Facebook – Click the Like button below. Hope you can join us!

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Learn More – Digital Camera Color Accuracy – Gamut

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The Purple Iris the way I saw it and my Minolta Dimage captured it.

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The Purple Iris as captured by my Canon G2.

Although this story was originally posted in 2002 it still applies today. Not all colors can be captured by a digital camera sensor.

Most of us have taken hundreds of pictures with our digital cameras without giving a thought to the crisp brilliant color images that we’ve captured. With few exceptions digital cameras produce very accurate renditions of what we see. There are times when digital cameras may cause some problems with color. This is especially important for people photographing flowers, artwork and dyed fabrics. Read on to find out more.

Have you ever taken a picture with your digital camera and the color looks nothing like what you saw? Digital cameras use a light sensitive chip to capture color & light. The sensitivity of these chips varies from camera to camera but as a general rule they have difficulty dealing with rich saturated tones.

Why does this happen? First, most of us work with RGB images, which means our images are made up of Red, Green and Blue components. Your camera is sensitive to a range of colors called the gamut. Let’s say your digital camera can capture the colors inside the triangle below. If the object your taking a picture of has a color that lies outside the GAMUT of your camera, your camera automatically chooses a color that is close which lies inside the triangle. In the case of our deep purple Iris flowers the closest color happens to be a shade of blue.

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The diagram on the bottom shows the deep purple Iris flower we saw and how the camera chose the closest available color which is actually more of a blue color.