Another tale of taking the camera with you is this shot of (what I think is) the Bahia Hotel in San Diego California. I was out on a paddle boat bay tour having the best Old Fashion that I have ever had when I looked to the west ot see the sun setting over this building. I had to ballance the ISO and shutter speed to keep my field of focus where I wanted it at a higher f-stop, but this nice shot popped out. In this post I’ll talk a little bit about why I tend to keep a camera in my backpack with me wherever I go.

       First things first, some housekeeping: I’m sorry the photos take so long to load on the website and that sometimes the Instagram pictures can be a little grainy. Ultimately I beefed it a little bit; I have been exporting my jpgs out of Lightroom at full image resolution from a 24MPx raw image, so they are massive images. Hence, they take a while to load. This is becoming an issue because the more images I add the more the longer it takes to load. Furthermore, when uploading to places like Instagram or photo selling websites (hint hint) these images tend to be too large. So every post after this one will be a ever so slightly lower image quality BUT I will be able to post more images to more places. Anywho, back to the good stuff.

       When doing photography as a hobby I often find that I am doing photography AND something else; in this case I was doing photography AND spending time with the family on a paddle boat tour. This tends to present it’s own form of challenges, but there are a handful of ways that I have found to help me get great shots without taking away from the atmosphere.

       The first of these is using one of the “semi-auto” modes that most modern cameras offer, those being aperture priority and shutter priority. I used the aperture priority setting for this one because it allowed me to set my field of focus and then set the ISO as low as I could while the camera handled the shutter speed adjustments. This was especially nice because it allowed me to fiddle with my camera less and I didn’t have to account for the movement of the boat or the shadows as much as I would have in full manual mode.

       This is not to dismiss full manual mode by any means, it is feature packed and gives you full control over your camera. However, I feel that there is a time and a place to let the uber quick computer in your hand do some of the work. I personally feel that a hobby that can seamlessly fit into your everyday (or at least your vacationing) life are the best kinds of hobbies to start. For me that hobby is photography. I have been surprised as how easily I have been able to keep going with the little blog and how many of you folks seem to be enjoying it. Thanks for following along and I hope you take you on many more adventures.

Best, -Ben