Category: photography

The Dallas Camera Club had its annual Photo Scavenger Hunt on Saturday, at the Fort Worth Stockyards. For those not aware, the Stockyards are roughly a Disneyland for cowboys — the couple-block area looks somewhat like an old-west set and everything is cowboy-themed.

We started early, at 9:00am, with the idea of beating the heat. We’d take photographs around noon and then we’d meet for lunch. We had to find and photograph these 10 items: breeze, look-up, look-down, tarantula, water, boots, hooved animals, gold, red, purple, and a cowboy. Many of the items were open to iterpretation, such as the colors in particular.

My strategy was to get token pictures of each item first and then go around and get better photographs with my remaining time. For instance, the Visitors’ Center had flowers out front that were gold, red and purple (which took care of all three of those). Then, as the morning went on, I looked for other items in those categories so that I wouldn’t have to use the flowers for all three keywords. I think I got all ten items, though I haven’t downloaded the images to my PC yet. I’ll probably post some of the better ones in a later entry.

After taking pictures all morning, we met for lunch at the H3 Ranch restaurant, which is part of the Stockyards Hotel. They have a fairly ordinary menu, including tacos, chicken-fried steak, and burgers. I went with a bacon-cheddar cheeseburger, though I asked the server if they had cheeses other than cheddar. They had pepper jack and I went with that.

The burger came with seasoned fries which were better than I thought they’d be. I added a touch of ketchup, at first, but it turned out that the fries were just fine on their own. The burger itself was mediocre; the top bun was too thick while the bottom bun was too thin and actually soggy. The cheese was fine but the bacon wasn’t crispy and I got the impression that it had been cooked much earlier and later added.

Some of us stayed for dessert and that turned out well. Their dessert menu had about four items, I think (cheesecake, hot brownie with Jack Daniels ice cream, peach cobbler, and one other item). Though hot brownies are hella-delicious, I just wasn’t sure about that Jack Daniels ice cream.

So, I ordered the cheesecake instead (with pecan praline sauce). I hadn’t tried praline sauce on cheesecake before, but it was really nice — it wasn’t too thick and had a good pecan flavor. And the cheesecake itself was some of the best that I’ve ever had — it was dense but with a light and fluffy texture.

I had such a great time and I was sorry to learn that the Dallas Camera Club only has scavenger hunts once a year. However the club has normal field trips every month. I’ll probably go to more of those as they’ll help me to stay in practice and learn more about photography.

I discovered through a thread on the DPReview Forums (about wishful features for the Coolpix 5700) that you can get a thread adapter for Coolpix 5xxx series cameras to allow filter attachments.

It’s just some guy out of Canada that machined (?) some thread adapters on his own. And, they're available for the Coolpix 5000, 5400 and 5700 in several sizes (46mm, 49mm, 52mm, and others).

I wanted to get one, but at first I wasn’t sure which adapter size would be best. Apparently, 52mm adn 58mm are two of the most common sizes for filters, so that narrowed it down. And, I was concerned that a 58mm filter might get in the way of the built-in popup flash, so I went with the 52mm.

I also picked up an Excellent-rated used Tiffen circular polarizer from KEH to go with it. If you’re not familiar with polarizers, they’re most commonly used to enhance blue skies and, as a rule of thumb, autofocus cameras need circular polarizers (as opposed to a linear polarizers).

I discovered the Dallas Camera Club last month and I’ve been going to their meetings since then. They have meetings on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month; the 3rd Tuesday is their regular meeting while the 1st Tueday is the competition meeting.

Not having much interest in entering pictures, I didn’t give much thought to competition meetings. However, at the last regular meeting, they had to finish some business from the last competition meeting since they ran out of time. So, I had the opportunity to see what went on at a competition meeting.

In addition to participants handing in images for that month’s competition, each competition meeting also includes commentary and results from the last competition. When the photos are turned in, they’re sent off each month to a judge such as a professional photographer or a photography professor. He or she then scores each photo and records some commentary on an audio cassette.

The pictures are mailed back to the club and the commentary is presented with the images. The room is dimmed, with the exception of a lit easel in the front of the room and, timed with the commentary, the various photographs are displayed.

So, of course, all of this happened at a regular meeting and I was pleasantly surprised — I had in mind that the competition meetings would be fairly boring as people turned in their photographs and received their scores. On the contrary, it was fascinating to hear the comments of a professional on such a variety of photographs.

The audio commentary really made the photo sequence much more interesting. And I now find myself really looking forward to the next competition meeting (August 5th).