Wanderer Photography

It’s been a while since I last wrote here… and for a good reason: for the past couple of weeks, I had some guests – my parents, coming to visit me and their first time in the US. Therefore, my bed was “invaded” (I actually offered to sleep on the couch), my kitchen and in general my life – I don’t complain though, my parents’ cooking skills are amazing and it was all for a good purpose. It had been a while since I last saw them (6 months) and it was their first time to see where I am and what has become of me out of their influence, 16 hours by plane and 10 time-zones away from them.

Since my vacation days are numbered and wanted to make the most of my parents’ time here, I decided to take some trips with them and experience the US. First, we went to Hawaii (Kona on the Big Island). I had been there before, but that place is so amazing it deserved another visit from me. On our way back (via San Francisco), we decided to skip the last leg of the trip back to Seattle and take a short 3-day trip to Las Vegas (actually, Vegas was only about 24 hours, more on that later) and only after that come back to Seattle (some of us have to work). Finally, on their way back home, I decided to escort them to New York and experience the Big Apple (more impressions on that later as well). Besides these trips, we also had some time to visit places around Washington state (for some reason, I didn’t take that many pictures in WA, at least not with my camera – I took some with my phone).

Now I’m back. Some statistics: I was away for about 2 weeks in total. I took about 1700 pictures, most of them for HDR purposes (3 exposures, so maybe I have some 600 pictures in total). I shot both RAW+JPEG fine at full resolution (16.2MP) and managed to use about 36GB for RAW and 15GB for the JPEG. Even though my camera (Nikon D7000) has two SD card slots for recording the images, the performance penalty in shooting RAW was very high – the buffer would be filled after 6-9 exposures and you would have to wait until those exposures are written to the card.

Side note: It is a bit shocking to me to see how much space I have used with these pictures at a reasonable resolution (to be frank, on the high end) and can’t dare to imagine what would happen with a Nikon D800 that has over twice the resolution (36MP).

The faithful servants in this trip (besides the camera) were two lenses: Tokina 11-16 f/2.8 (with UV and CPOL filter) and the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 (also with UV and CPOL filters) and my tripod. I was on the fence with my 70-210 f/4-5.6, but I decided to pass on it due to the added weight and size restrictions (I only had a carry on luggage on the trip). I decided to also pass on my other lenses, the Nikon 35mm f/1.8 and 50mm f/1.8 as I am not sure I would have taken any good portraits and, even though they are small and almost weightless, the overlap with the 17-50 gave me no extra reason to bring them with me.

Off I go now, to edit some pictures, run around the house and… why not, actually sleep. I leave you with a low-light, low-quality picture of my tools.

/cd