Visiting Downtown Durham, NC

 Since moving to North Carolina 5 1/2 years ago, Lee Ann and I had been to Durham only a handful of times. That changed recently, when I went to the Duke University Eye Center seeking some relief of a couple of vision issues I'd been experiencing for some time. 

In the past two years, I have seen two optometrists, a cataract specialist (and surgeon), a glaucoma specialist, a retinal ophthalmologist and a retinal surgeon. And up to this point, each consultation has failed to rectify the issues. 

I'll spare you the details, but the most recent trip to the Eye Center in Durham was for an invasive surgery, called a vitrectomy, which was to remove a thin layer of membrane in front of the right retina, which the surgeon is hoping will solve both my issues -- slight blurriness and distortion. The blurriness I first noticed in spring 2021, and the distortion I first noticed after cataract surgery in October 2021. 

I'm in my second week of recovery from the surgery, and the surgeon says she might not know for certain if the procedure was a success for up to three months. Yes, it's a slow healing process. So we'll see. 

After a second follow-up visit to the surgeon's office Tuesday, Lee Ann and I decided to find a local establishment for lunch and (for me) a brew, and then saunter through the downtown area. The sauntering, which involved a flurry of picture-taking, was uplifting for me. 

I had missed indulging my community profile photography, and I was more than pleasantly surprised at how striking the Durham downtown was. And the architecture was pretty nifty as well. 

Leading off this post is one view of the amazing main Durham Public Library building. Immediately below is three sides of the modernist City Hall. The first two sides I came upon I found curious, but then that third side. Wow. 

And the Trinity United Methodist Church, which is just around the corner from City Hall. It's an amazing structure, rebuilt in 1924 after a fire destroyed the previous building, with a three-arch breezeway connecting the church with other facilities. The spire was added in 1985.

 

Trinity United Methodist Church, beginning with the side view (above), then a view of the doors and front steps (below), the triple-arched breezeway (second below) and a closeup of the front doors (third below). 

Above and below are two more views of different sides of the Main Library. 

Above is the first side view of City Hall you see when you approach it from Trinity United Methodist Church. Below is the straight-on front view. And then the second photo below -- the glorious view of the other side of the building!

Above, a full view of the Durham County Court House; below, a closeup of its doors. 

First Presbyterian Church (above) and its more modern school building (below). 

Above: The Durham Parks and Recreation building; below, one side of the county judicial annex, which is across the street from the courthouse, although this view is along a perpendicular street. 

A couple of full-building murals, the one above on the side of Bull City Burger and Brew on East Parrish Street goes back quite a few years. 

 

Above, and the two photos below are simple slices of the downtown merchants' district. 

Salute to the MagMod on-flash modifier

Those of you who have been with me and this blog for a while might remember the post I did nine years ago when I put my then-new Graslon on-flash modifiers to the test while photographing a rehearsals for one of the  Garfield Shakespeare Company productions in Indianapolis. 

While I was mostly pleased with how the Graslon performed, I made a point to mention my biggest grievance, which was that the modifier did not stay attached to the flash as it was supposedly supposed to. 

The Graslon company had someone monitoring the Internet at the time to detect references to the modifers in news articles, blog posts and the like. They saw my post and responded to my beef about the lack of secure fitting of the modifier. They offered suggestions, which I promised to try -- and I did. To no avail. I found that the attachment continued to not be securely afixed no matter what I tried. I stopped using it.

Then a few years later -- it's probably been five or six years now -- I came across another modifier that promised the same light-diffusing benefits as the Graslon but with much better flash attachment security, so I tried it on a money-back guarantee. 

I fell in love with the MagMod MagSphere on-flash modifier immediately, and I have not had a lick of trouble with it from the get-go. The sphere attaches to the top of the flash unit with a magnet drawn to an open-ended grip, or sleeve, that you first slip over the flash head. (The magnet is the "mag" part of MagMod). I simply leave the grip on the flash at all times; the silicone sphere, the actual modifier, is easily removable from the magnetic grip after use to pack away. 

The MagMod sphere nicely distributes the light from the flash when I use it, filling in dark spaces nicely and not over lighting faces. It also does not produce red-eye.

I used the MagMod last week for the first time in probably two years when I took a multi-generation picture of Lee Ann's family who had gathered at her daughter's home for an early Thanksgiving dinner while we were there.  

I hadn't used the MagMod a whole lot in recent years. largely because the volume of my photography in general dropped considerably as a result of the COVID lockdown and aftermath. So turning to it for the family pictures required a brief reacquaintance, but not so much with the modifier which is a snap to get on. The real reacquaintance was with my flash unit, a Canon 580 EX. I put it on TTL and manually set the flash zoom to about 55mm (I was using a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens on my Canon 6D).

I used the manual shooting mode, setting my ISO to 400, my shutter to 1/160 and my aperture to f/8 because we had three rows of people, which I felt necessitated a safe depth of field to get everyone in the picture in focus and sharp. The images require minimum adjustment in Photoshop Elements afterward. 

These were not formal portraits -- we just got the people together and tried to shoot quickly, mostly because of the youngster in the front row who was not an easy one to persuade to sit still or coach how to pose and smile. 

Afterward, the girlfriend of one of Lee Ann's grandsons asked us to take the shot of the two of them with her dog (below). Again, we weren't striving for perfection in the pose here, but I did spend some time in Photoshop healing some issues I came across on each of the couple's faces. Hopefully you won't detect any major problems there. I took this photo in vertical orientation, and the MagMod had no trouble following the flash when I cranked it upward from a position perpendicular to the camera. 

I will mention that Lee Ann and I both tried to talk the couple into using a solid-color background, which was actually very handy and nearby. But they wanted the black-and-white wall hanging showing the urban community as their background. I elected not to argue. The photo below was the only one I shot; they were pleased with it.  

To be clear, I present these not to be a study (and certainly not a lesson) on portraiture. Indeed, in retrospect, I do wish we'd taken more time to better pose the ladies on the ends of the middle row of the group photo, for example. 

I present these to show you how the MagMod Sphere performed in very little time or preparation. The importance of the photo was to include Lee Ann's 99-year-old uncle and 97-year-old aunt (seated in front on either side of Lee Ann's youngest grandson in photo leading off the post) in a picture of some kind with extended family. The group includes Lee Ann's mother, sister, oldest daughter, three grandsons and son-in-law. So in the sense that we got everyone in one photo in a rare confluence of family, we considered it a success. 

Return to the Indianapolis Zoo

 Several weeks ago, I presented several posts from shoots I took during my visit to Indiana in September, and there were four posts in all. 

It did not occur to me until today that I had forgotten about two other shoots from that trip, and they were pretty significant shoots. I'll skip over the "forgetfulness is part of the aging process" and simply go right to making up for that omission. 

I'll start in chronological order, which takes me to the Indianapolis Zoo, my first visit there since going in 2015 and 2016 with my grandchildren. This time, it was with Lee Ann's daughter, Mindy, and her 6-year-old son, Jaxson. 

As I did with all my other shoots on the trip to Indiana in September, I used my iPhone 13 Pro exclusively for this zoo visit. On the whole, I was underwhelmed with the results; I took a couple hundred shots at the zoo, and I bet less than half of them were worth keeping. 

At the time, I thought I was getting a lot more good-quality shots (especially in the area of sharpness) than I did. But once I went to put together this post, I saw that wasn't the case. Plus, there were a few shots I would have liked to have been to try to capture with a powerful zoom lens on a DSLR camera. Let's just say that after doing a blind (sans editing) upload of my zoo shots a couple weeks ago to a gallery on my SmugMug site, I've since gone back and removed all the poor-quality images.  

One of the new things at the zoo since my last visit was the kangaroo exhibit (see photo leading off the post), which actually is set up as a pedestrian walk-through. Seriously, visitors just walk through a fenced-off area and look at the 'roos lying around and about, like you see in the lead-off photo.

Below is a short review of the shots that turned out either pretty good or just plain good. 

 

Returning to Yates Mill Pond Park, this time with the DSLR

On Monday,  I made my second trip to historic Yates Mill Pond Park in Wake County. Unlike the previous visit a couple weeks ago, this time I brought my Canon 6-D and walked a longer trail -- the two-miler Creekside Trail -- on this visit.

The trail includes a portion with a loop that brings you back to the main trail so you can return to the place you started. Midway through the trail, walkers can see a picturesque open farm field and structures beyond the park border. 

Autumn colors were sprouting in some places and vibrant in others. By that indication, I'm hoping to see lots of vibrant colors this year -- in contrast to what we had the past couple years -- in the next couple of weeks. 

The photos you see here are from Monday's visit, my third in all to Yates Mill Pond Park. The image leading off the post is the dramatic scene one has when approaching the pond boardwalk from the side of the parking lot and amphitheater. 

The array includes pond and creek reflections, examples of some of the more vibrant colors, images taken along the trail inside the woods (including a striking silhouette looking toward the farmland mentioned above) and a couple shots of the boardwalk from the trail side of the pond.  I finish with a color flourish from a modest garden in the parking lot.