Random Thoughts
September has begun and that means I get to report on my previous month statistics as well as perhaps do a small recap on various topics of interest (stat wise) for the month of August. I would like to stick to at last one post a day sort of routine which I find many bloggers aim for but unfortunately I tend to post when I find something interesting to post about which means it can be a few hours, few days or even up to a week before I can post something new. Though I do try to post within a few days even if it is something simple.
The past few days (4 days) Robyn and I have been over on Vancouver Island visiting some friends in Victoria. Now for me Victoria is my happy place and I always enjoy going over and doing some simple tourist-type such as visiting the Mammoth at the BC Museum or walking around the Inner Harbour taking photos of the Vintage Boats during a festival. We even went tubing down the Cowichen River in the Cowichen Valley (near Duncan) which was a first for me. If you have never been tubing down a river I recommend doing it!
Now that I am back and in front of a computer I can look at setting up some posts here such as a statistic recap for August, perhaps some information on our tubing adventure with some photos and video and whatever else I might find interesting.
Though since I have not near a computer for the previous four days the only thing I have at the moment to share is a photo I took today on a photo-walk in Stanley Park at Lost Lagoon in Vancouver.
Lost Lagoon is home to many types of birds and can be usually pretty good place to take some decent shots of the local residents. If you have ever done the Stanley Park Seawall you might also find that it can take up to 3 hours to walk the entire 10Km distance. The main question I hear tourists ask is how far do they have to go to complete the seawall from where they are. Typically they have another 2 hours to go if they want to complete the entire trek.
On a side note I have also been only shooting in RAW format on my Canon EOS 450D and I do not think I will ever go back to shooting in just JPEG. Sure shooting in RAW makes it a bit more tedious when working with files on the computer such as showing the images to people but I recently have been using the Demo for Adobe’s Lightroom and I find it such a great and powerful tool. It allows me to save ‘web’ batches for when I wish to share then with people but the editing tools they offer you when using RAW format allow you to fine-tune your photos if they aren’t quite perfect. Though I think now since I shoot in RAW only, I’ll have to find some larger SDHC cards. Currently I use 2x 4GB cards and they give me about 240 photos for each card. If anyone has any great deals on 8GB, 16GB or even a 32GB SDHC memory card I would be quite happy in looking at it. With today’s memory card capacities I am surprised more people don’t shoot with higher resolutions or even RAW when possible.
Nice photo Tyler…but I couldn’t help but notice the water ripple…which brought me to noticing other things
One thing to be wary of when dealing with larger cards. The whole eggs in one basket syndrome. If you were to misplace, misfile a card you stand to lose quite a few images. This weekend I almost had such a horrible experiencee though I only stood to lose 50 pictures when my full memory card slipped from my pocket during a wedding shoot. It would have been tragic to lose those 20 minutes of the cermony but not cripling as I had other cards from different parts of the ceremony. The tragedy was adverted when I found my card in the grass.
@joshua yea just as I clicked the shutter button the bird dropped a load!
@brennan I remember seeing that you were going to do a wedding but if I knew when/where I was going to ask to tag along to see how it went. I have people asking me to do wedding photography but I am nooo where near experienced enough to even attempt yet let alone have the proper equipment for it. Glad you were able to find your card though!
Great post Tyler. One thing I would LOVE to do is shoot in RAW but unfortunately I have only a point and shoot camera. That’ll change eventually, but I need an iphone and a MacBook first
There are some point and shoot cameras that allow for RAW. Canon’s G series allows for it and I am sure some other higher-end point-n-shoots can. But with memory card sizes these days I’m surprised that camera manufacturers don’t offer RAW with more of their product lines.