One of the nice things that they did when they built Legoland was to preserve some of the old Cypress Gardens. The first shot is the entrance to the old botanical gardens along with a Lego southern belle. The second shot is the biggest banyan tree I have ever seen. All of the branches and shoots are part of one tree....
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Probably the coolest area of Legoland for adults are the city scenes built entirely from Legos. There are many Florida cities including Tampa, Miami, and Tallahassee. There are also San Fransisco, Las Vegas, and New York City for US cities. For world cities London is the only one I can remember. Being from Tampa, the Tampa scene was really cool for me to see. The photos...
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A couple of days ago we made our first trip to Legoland Florida for my daughter’s fifth birthday. I had been to Cypress Gardens as a kid and was interested to see what they had done with it. The did preserve a small part of Cypress Gardens including the huge banyan tree and the Gazebo. Here is a little about Cypress Gardens from Wikipedia “Billed as...
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My posting schedule will probably be pretty light over the next month. We are in the process of moving and have a lot going on right now. I will still post sporadically hopefully and will be back to a more normal schedule again in June. The two shots tonight are from the early morning and sunrise. The sunrise shot was from my shoot of the Skypoint condo building. I liked...
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The first outing I took after getting my new Canon 5D Mark III a couple of months ago was to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge for a sunrise. The shots did not turn out quite like I hoped, but I got a couple of good ones. The other shot is a little older one from the Mahaffey Theater....
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According to today’s Tampa Bay Times, the St Petersburg Pier is set to close May 31st. I have said before that it was always one of the focal points of downtown to me as a photographer. My main hope is that whatever they end up replacing it with, being the Lens or something else, is that it fills that same niche. Someplace to go and hang out along the water....
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These two places are kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum. The Glazer Children’s Museum is of course all about kids. There are a lot of things to do there and if you have kids it is definitely worth a visit. Harbour Island on the other hand is a little more on the sophisticated side. Jackson’s Bistro is one of the best known places for brunch in the Tampa...
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I generally prefer to shoot my photos of downtown in the early morning. That way I can capture night like pictures before sunrise, the sunrise itself and the early morning. The other huge benefit is there are very few people to get in my pictures. The morning I shot these I had headed downtown to capture the Skypoint building. Since I got there early I took a few shots...
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It’s amazing that you can find some backyard wildlife even in the middle of the very developed area of South Tampa. This afternoon along the fence in my backyard I spotted these pair of mating moths. After looking them up I found out that they are Pink-striped Oakworm Moths (Anisota virginiensis). The female is the larger of the two. This was in addition to this...
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Winding roads area a landscape photographers dream. Our trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway last fall was full of them. As a photographer you almost want to stop every time you turn the corner and see a new scene in front of you. Lynn Cove Viaduct is probably the most famous section of the parkway, especially from a photography perspective. I arrived early and was setup for...
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I really like shooting older buildings and of course, Great Smoky Mountains National Park has a lot of nicely preserved ones. The homesteader cabins are found throughout the park but mostly in the Cades Cove region and the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail....
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I finally got around to finishing all of my processing from my Christmas trip to Disney and my visit to a bunch of the hotels. These are definitely two of my favorite hotels, the Grand Floridian and Wilderness Lodge....
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In honor of the first round of the NFL draft tonight I decided to post a few more shots from my tour of Raymond James Stadium. It was not easy growing up as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan for the 80s and until the late 90s when Tony Dungy arrived. The championship in 2002 was amazing after watching years and years of the “Suckaneeers”....
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Tonight I am going with a couple more shots from the Tampa Bay Times Forum. The Tampa Bay Lightning is almost finished with a kind of disappointing season. Despite having two of the league scoring leaders in Steven Stamkos and Marty St Louis, the lightning is again not going to make the playoffs. Despite this they are still consistently bringing big crowds to the Tampa...
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I definitely need to try to shoot more vertical compositions. I definitely default to the horizontal composition for the majority of my photos. I really noticed this when I was trying to find a background to use for my Iphone and found a lot more horizontal photos. These two viewpoints are probably my favorite in Tampa. There is the view of downtown from Tampa General...
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During my exploration of downtown Tampa last weekend I found a couple of old buildings that I had not really noticed before. My favorite was the Carriage Repository. It is an old building that is definitely in a state of disrepair and has ivy growing on the side. You can just make out the text of Carriage Repository and Tampa Harness and Wagon Company. The only...
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As I mentioned yesterday, I was in downtown in the morning taking some photographs of the Skypoint condo building for a prospective client. She was looking for something with rather extreme processing, which isn’t my normal, but was fun to do for a change. The first shot I am posting tonight was one of my favorite shots from the morning as I was able to capture a...
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I went out this morning mostly to take a few shots of the Skypoint condo building due to a request for a specific composition that I was asked for. There were some nice clouds and a decent sunrise although it was pretty overcast the rest of the day. After getting some pictures of Skypoint I wandered north along Ashley Boulevard and ended up at the Straz Center for the...
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The Grand Floridian Hotel at Disney is definitely the fanciest and most elegant of the Disney hotels in Orlando. It is especially beautiful at Christmas time when there is a huge tree in the central lobby along with several smaller trees throughout....
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Tonight I am going with two very different sights from downtown Tampa. I have one of the classic skyline shots that I captured along with some nice clouds. The other shot is from my first visit to Oaklawn Cemetery, which believe it or not, is basically in downtown Tampa. Here is a little info from Wikipedia (Oaklawn Cemetery was Tampa, Florida’s first public burial...
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