Fotos by Carlos

Joel Sartore's Fundamentals of Photography series for The Great Courses has me trying to be more intentional about backgrounds in my fotos. One of the tricks I've been practicing for this is to use the sky as background. The beach was too crowded to get a clean background, so I pointed the camera up. This sign has loomed over a shopping center in Hialeah, FL (my favorite city!), since before I was born. It's pretty much instantly recognizable to anybody familiar with the area.

One of the great things about living in SoFla is that we're never very far from a beach. Miami Beach gets the attention, but I like Dania Beach, which is about an hour north and a lot less crowded. Below are some highlights. Not sure I want my camera around so much sand again, but at least there were some decent shots. Most of these were taken with a circular polarizing filter and all were taken with standard kit lens (I'm poor, guys). Dania Beach Pier Pelicans are some of my favorite birds. My girlfriend was very excited about the shells she found. I should take more vertical shots.

I love shooting either in the city, where the buildings and the art (legal and illegal) make things interesting. It's also fun to shoot in places remote enough to find interesting plants and wildlife. Miramar, Fl, is neither of these things. It's a suburb filled with cookie-cutter houses in gated communities and strip malls with chain restaurants. I didn't expect much out of an evening stroll with my girlfriend and favorite model (who are the same person, to be clear). Boy, was I wrong. Exploring the weirder corners of the area as the sun went down led to some pleasing shots, taking advantage of interesting lighting. I'm also getting more confident with my camera settings, which leads to much less editing. None of these photos have been edited beyond a little cropping and straightening out. I was surprised to find that there are still a few houses left from a time before there was even a suburb. Florida is prone to flat, swampy landscapes like this, but that...

Made it down to Wynwood this afternoon. For those who don't know, it's a neighborhood in Miami with a history of being a little rough around the edges, but which has gentrified pretty quickly in the last five years. By Miami standards, it's a little more cleaned up than I like to see, but friends from out of town assure me it's still fairly grimy. Anyway, rain kept me from being able to take half the fotos I wanted to take, but it's hard to walk through the area without finding something of visual interest, so I still got some decent shots. Below are my favorites from today, with chrome filter applied, and a little context in captions (when I feel they're needed). Towards the center of this foto is Atomik's distinctive smiling orange. If you're in Miami and never see one of these, you have failed at seeing Miami. The harsh, bright light presented some challenges, but I feel like I'm getting better at making the camera do what I w...