beach walk Roatan

Two days ago now, I decided to go for a long walk down the beach. Adam, my friend that grew up here, said that the beach was contiguous, that you could walk the whole way to West Bay (not to be confused with west end, where we’re staying).

So, having decided against scuba instruction, I figured the walk would be a good afternoon’s entertainment. I could get a feel for the island and see what there was to see. I also managed to get mild heat exhaustion and a slight sunburn. Lesson learned (for probably the fifth time): when you go for a walk in the tropics, wear sunscreen and take a bottle of water.

From where we’re staying, it’s about a 10 minute walk to the end of half moon bay (no relation to the one in cali). There’s a point where the paved road stops, and the beach is the only way forward. I walked about 2/3rds of the way to the far tip of the island, and turned back because I didn’t have any water and I was tired. After all, this is a vacation, not a death march.

A note about the photos: I’m getting a little more used to the phone-only workflow. It’s still clunky, just because switching between apps is not as fast as it is on the desktop, and because I use 4 different apps to get them ready to upload (currently: camera+, ps mobile, photos, and flickr). Hopefully I’ve sorted the ordering; editing this way, over ssh, I have to publish the post before I can see.

sunset at sundowners

I’m not sure what order these will show up in. after a couple of days’ recovery from the trip, i finally got off my ass to take some photos. we were at this bar, sundowner’s, which is known for its sunsets. and about half an hour before the main event, i parked myself in a lounger right on the water, and shot these with the 14mm on the Fuji.

some of them are of course after the sunset, but they were all taken within 20 feet of the lounger. if all my shooting went this easily, well, i could use this blog as a tax write off.the island here is treating us exceptionally well.

Power is out this morning, over a big chunk of the island, so i’m writing this on my phone from a cafe. keepin’ it real, as papa tony(AKA the blogfather) would say. i’m back to the relaxing.

edit to add: the power is back on at the casa, and I thought I’d fix the ordering of these with the not-laptop I brought with me. Ipad plus adapter plus atreus keyboard, with custom channel for holding the device. works decently well, the only improvement would be a bluetooth version.

in the street with the x-pro 2

on that last post, sophie chastised me for saying I wasn’t going to write a camera review, and then doing it anyway. What I meant was it wasn’t meant to be a thorough exercise in putting the camera through it’s paces, but more my first impressions. Now that I’ve had the thing a few weeks, I have more impressions.

Especially with the 14mm, it’s a machine made for the street. Discreet, close, quiet. Zone focusing is a cinch, and changing from manual to auto as needed is as simple as pushing the focus ring. I think all of these were hip shot, that is, not looking through the viewfinder, and manual focus.

That said, I do have a few gripes: the auto-switch between the eye-level viewfinder and the LCD is still too slow for quick shooting. The buttons on the back, including the little joystick everyone else was so happy about, are really easy to knock and move settings around. More than once I’ve found the camera in some weird drive or focus mode, with the focus point off to one corner.

When you shoot a lot with this camera, it gets warm in your hand. I ran down a battery shooting a group of dancers and mariachi band, and it was weird that it got that warm. I mean, pushing around those pixels can’t be easy, but still. I’m not sure that’s normal.

Next post: nothing about cameras. Probably a nice picnic.

photo walk with the new X-Pro2

So, last Saturday, on a whim, I went to the camera store. Not just any camera store, but easily the best one I’ve been to here in the bay area: Looking Glass Photo, over just off San Pablo. The Fuji reps were there, hanging out with a pile of cameras and lenses for people to play with. They even had the GFX, the new medium format (some part of me dies, calling something less than 6x4.5 medium format, but I digress). So, I got to play with the X-Pro, which was another frontrunner for my next camera, and decided that waiting 6 months and paying triple the price really wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. So I bought it.

I’m still getting used to the camera, and this isn’t really a review, jut my initial impressions. The important stuff: AF is a bazillion times faster than the old model, but still not quite as fast as my nikon D750. Whatever, it doesn’t need to be; it’s sufficient. There’s very little shutter lag; I don’t have any kind of test rig but haven’t had any problems. The files are great, probably two stops better than the old xpro; the highlights drop off a little faster than my nikon, at least subjectively.

The viewfinder is just wide enough to show the edges of the 14mm framelines, although with my glasses on I can’t see the edges. Luckily, the live view is a little narrower and there’s enough eye-relief that it works. Lag is down to almost imperceptible levels; the old camera would make me motion sick if I used it in live view in a car, but this one is fine. Also, the picture-in-frame focus aid is really quite good.

The bad: the wifi doesn’t support downloading of raw files; you have to convert them in camera and then it’ll read them. I seem to keep knocking off settings by accidentally pressing buttons, although the basics seem to stay in place. I’m also not used to it at all, so it’s very possible this is my fault.

Sunday, instead of my usual sit-around-the-house-and-watch-cartoons, I went out for a photo walk, and the weather cooperated and gave me lots of nice clouds and clear air. It was rainy in Oakland, so I headed for the mission, where the sun was shining and it was also raining– SF, where the microclimates have microclimates. I decided to fight my natural urge to walk downhill and headed up 21st street, towards Twin Peaks (the park, not the bar). About a mile and a half uphill from there, I called a lyft to get me the rest of the way up; I didn’t want to get there and be completely blown out.

I did a first pass edit in the camera, but I ended up going back to the raw files for this post; the final images aren’t that different, but I feel better about them.