Shalimar on Harbour Island

Got a G blog alert for a hit on Harbour Island. Always nice to see a good blog entry behind the linkage; especially when it sports some nice pictures from one of my favorite islands -- always better than the usual boring blog spam.

Behind the lens of those nice blog photos was the lovely Shalimar -- apparent world traveler and food expert. Shal graces us internet surfers with some nice photos from around Valentine's Marina and Harbour Island. Some of her work reminds me I need to shoot more food shots -- and go on a diet. I've been thinking about buying a second small camera just for that -- taking the food pictures that is. I'll leave the diet for another day.

Anyway, curiousity took me to a few of Shal's other sites and I found we share some commonalities -- we blog when we can -- and we've both dined at Angela's on Harbour Island. Yet another thing I've been trying to get my lovely wife, Rose Mary, to do since she's the food expert in the Family: write some Bahamas restaurant reviews. Perhaps this next trip? We already have reservations for Rock House Hotel on Harbour Island this coming April. Rosie has done several for Eleuthera Restaurants that I thought were rather nice.

Shal did some nice photography work during her dining experience at Angela's. The only thing not nice about it was it made me ravenous for some conch fritters. Thanks for that, Shal! I think I just gained another pound just thinking about them. Deelish! Thanks for that, Rachel Ray...

So when I get done checking Shal's Harbour Island trip report, I made a few comments on her blog and received a very nice reply along with a few more links for her content. Nice work!

One of the shots was a scene I had also shot on the northern end of Dunmore Town. The scene had a nice view of the bay, a couple of old chairs under a very old slanted wood roof, and an old wire spool was used for playing dominoes on. Shal caught the shot just right. My photo had a Bahamian gentleman sitting at the makeshift table with some dominoes, but the exposure wasn't the best and neither was the pose. I did, however, manage to shoot a couple of reasonable shots of the nearby two story structure -- one of them shown above.

Love your stuff, Shal, and thanks for the pix and the trip report! Now pass the conch fritters please!

pj

Visit Harbour Island Bahamas
©2008 Perry Joseph

Harbour Island Bahamas Virtual Reality

Harbour Island provided me with a number of unique opportunities to shoot my favorite type of picture, virtual reality and panoramas.

I added a page to HarbourIslandGuide.com called Harbour Island Virtual Reality Tour.

The image of Lone Tree, as seen from the camera as it points directly down, is shown here. Those virtual reality images where you can see everything above and below are referred to as "fully submersive" or "equirectangular" panoramas.

In the case of the virtual reality picture of Dunmore Town and Harbour Island beach where you can't see the bottom (nadir) or top (zenith), these would be referred to a "cylindrical" panoramas.

If it isn't already obvious, some of the difficulties in taking these types of pictures is getting the exposure just right and avoiding problems with high contrast scenes -- a frequent problem in this type of environment.

Another typical obstacle in shooting panoramic images is finding views that are worthy throughout the 360 degree field of view. In that particular case, a place like Harbour Island almost makes that problem a non-issue.

One feature I really like about shooting panoramas is being able to extract a portion of the image and and use that as a single image. You can see an example of this on one of my Lone Tree images in my new print art gallery for Harbour Island. It's an extract from the Virtual Lone Tree panorama.

pj

Visit Harbour Island Bahamas
©2008 Perry Joseph

Harbour Island Pictures and Images Gallery

I finally got around to launching my Harbour Island Pictures and Images shop. I had a difficult time choosing which photos to start with. Harbour Island has so much to offer a photographer.

One of my favorites is Harbour Island's Crown Street. This little narrow street is so Bahamian, so rich in colors; pink, coral, green, white along with a polaroid blue to back it all up. So peaceful and natural.

Another favorite in the gallery is the triple exposure shot of Harbour Island's famous "Lone Tree". It's actually a part of a larger virtual reality / panoramic shot of Lone Tree. I plan on getting that and another virtual reality shot of Dunmore Town posted on HarbourIslandGuide.com.

In fact, instead of my just gabbing about it and then waiting another 9 months to do it, I think I'll work on that right now. Great way to start the New Year -- start thinking about that next visit to Harbour Island and Eleuthera.

pj

Visit Harbour Island Bahamas
©2008 Perry Joseph