Interesting Tampa places for photos

Sunset skyline of Tampa FloridaMy previous post covered the first two days of my recent trip to Tampa and how I approached it as a stock photographer. This post expands on the opportunities around Tampa if you are there for some other purpose (as I was) but have a bit of free time. I was still searching for a good sunset, and so on the Tuesday evening after dinner I decided to try the city again, so back in the car and down to the General Hospital car park again for sunset and dusk shots of the city skyline. This evening was much better as far as light was concerned. The sun sets off to the west (naturally), but this still gives nice coloration to the sky behind the city when seen from the hospital. I took the shot above, then a stitched panorama:
Hi Res Panorama of Tampa City Skyline Florida

And then a series of HDR shots as the night slowly arrived. I use the merge to HDR function in Photoshop and then process the resulting 32 bit file back in Lightroom as that gives a natural look but also great noise control as you have a very wide range of exposure values to play with. I think this one is my favorite of the bunch of HDR shots:
Night time descends on Tampa Florida

Up early the next morning (my last day in Tampa) for the sunrise found me down at Ballast Point Park off Bayshore Boulevard south of Tampa. I wasn’t that lucky with the sunrise and the city of Tampa is some way across the bay from here – so a 200mm lens with 1.4x extender was necessary to fill the screen with the city skyline. Of course, that brought the mist and humidity into play (as well as steamed up glass on the lenses) and I struggled to get a good shot. Closer shots were more interesting – another fishing pier and a Great White Egret in the water:
Great White Egret at Sunrise off Tampa

But the day was not done yet – it was only about 7am and so I drove into Tampa to the University of Tampa and the old moorish architecture of the main building there. I found (later) that you can park in front of the building, but I found some street parking nearby, and took a good few shots of this interesting building as the sun rose higher into the sky.
Wide marble balcony of University of Tampa Floriday

Even then, a stock photographer’s day never really ends, so I went up to the top floor of the car park at the airport to capture a few editorial shots to finish my trip to Florida. All in all, I ended up with around 145 shots that I have uploaded to my own site. Quite a number of these are editorial in nature and I’m putting those on Alamy and Corbis. I may remove the signs from one of my Tampa skylines and submit that as RF on the microstock sites when I get a chance as well. All in all, a productive couple of days.
Terminal at Tampa International Airport