April 2024 Best in Street Category
About Dennis I am a husband of 50 years, father to 3 adult children, 5 grandchildren, pastor, police chaplain and photographer. I have lived for 38 years in Cape Coral, FL. I grew up in Oregon and go there and other locations throughout the Pacific Northwest regularly to visit family, including my 91 year old mother.
What Inspires I am inspired by a love for God’s creation and especially how light interacts with nature. And my mission in life is to inspire transformissional living! It might be through capturing God’s splendid creation via my camera, writing a blog, speaking in a public venue or a face-to-face conversation.
About the image I shot this image Easter weekend at one of the 7 services at Cape Christian, the church my wife and I started 38 years ago. I had just purchased a new Nikon Z 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and I wanted to try it out for the first time on my Z9 that I’ve had for two years. So I took the camera and lens to church because I had no responsibilities on the stage. All of the house lighting was off and only stage lights on so it was very dark. I set the camera on Shutter Priority and set it at 1/500 sec. because I was shooting the worship team on stage that involved movement. I set the aperture wide open and put the ISO on Auto.
The shot I chose was one of two that I kept in that situation. The other shot was completely focused on the child and the grandfather that was holding him was a bit out of focus. This image had the best focus on both the grandfather and grandson but yet had all of the people in the background blurred out by leaving it at the f/2.8 aperture when I was not at the full zoom of 200mm which would have brought more bokeh.
This shot also has other layers of personal meaning to me and that is why I chose the title “Easter Worship Legacy.” I intentionally chose to leave a leadership legacy by developing and implementing a succession plan that would set up the church I started for long-term success and continue to impact the younger generations on into the future. The child in the photo is the 3-year-old son of my successor and the grandfather of the boy is also the father of my successor. So legacy is throughout the picture.
Meta Data of Photo – Shot with a Nikon Z9 with a Nikon Z 70-200 f/2.8 S lens at 1/500 sec, f/2.8, at 94mm with ISO 25600. Always shoot only in RAW.
Outline of Workflow
- Transfer from Memory Card to External hard drive
- Import from hard drive into Lightroom Classic
- Curate the photos, flagging the keepers and deleting all the rest from the hard drive
- Then I make adjustments needed in Lightroom
- Export from Lightroom into JPEG
- Upload a copy of JPEG’s to Google Drive in the cloud and also to a separate hard drive
- Only then do I reformat the Memory Card once I have three other copies (1 RAW, 2 JPEGS)
Trips and Plans
- Just returned from 9 day River Cruise in Germany, Netherlands and Belgium during Tulip Season
- 3 Day Cruise in June to Bahamas with entire family, kids and grandkids
- 4 Days in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia in July
- A week in Oregon in August
- Montana for 12 Days in September. I will be taking a photographer friend with me to see Glacier National Park for his first time. We will spend 4 full days inside GNP to go places I went to while I attended a photography workshop there in 2014