mastering mediocrity, part 2

This afternoon on the way home from work I was running btween Best Buy stores from my work side of town to the location in West Oaks Mall, looking for any of the iPad 3's that Best Buy had put on sale in the middle of the week. As bad luck would have it, there weren't any more to be had. I should have expected this; Best Buy is too well known for having too-good-to-be-true sales on very limited stock quantities. I first learned that lesson on a Black Friday back in the mid-1990s at the West Oaks Best Buy, after getting there and waiting three hours before the store opened. By the time I finally got into the store on that particular Black Friday morning, all the special low-priced notebooks that were advertised the day before were gone, and the store had only been open fifteen minutes by the time I walked in the front door. I swore back then I'd never shop at any Best Buy unless I had no other choice. Today I should have stuck to my original resolve.

On the way out of the Best Buy parking lot, I drove through the connected parking lots of three other closed businesses that face West Colonial; Toys 'R' Us, Chevy's Fresh Mex, and Borders Bookstore. The Toys 'R' Us moved to a new location next to Millenia Mall, the Chevy's closed when they opened a new one at Disney's Lake Buena Vista, and Borders closed when the whole corporation shut down nation-wide mid-2011. I don't remember the order in which each business closed, but Border's was the last to close; Toys 'R' Us and Chevy's were already boarded up when Borders closed its doors for good.

On the way out I stopped in the Chevy's parking lot and and walked around from there. While walking and photographing I started hearing the cries of what I thought were hawks, but were in fact ospreys. A nesting pair had set up a spot in the top of one of the old parking lot lights. While standing and gawking I saw one of the pair swoop by with a large fish in its claws. I tried for some photos of either one, but all I managed to do was to spook them away. It was just a short time later that the mall security drove up and informed me I couldn't photograph the closed buildings. I sat there for a moment, and then told the guard, fine, I'll come back when you're not around. He didn't say anything so I left. My goal is to go back and photograph those ospreys. The only other spot I've seen nesting ospreys was about two years ago in Lakeland.

Technical

Everything taken with the Olympus E-M5 and the Panasonic 1.7/20mm and M.Zuiko 40-150mm R. All the photos were taken using the E-M5's key line art filter. In post I selected three for RAW post processing using LR4 and Color Efex 4. I've created my own customer filter from the black gold filter in Color Efex, with tweaks for my own taste, and that's what I used on the three above. They should be obvious.

For the very first time since I started to take digital photography seriously I am approaching a look to my work that I really like and consider mine. And it's the top photo.