Welcome home
After a brief vacation-ish stint to Las Vegas, I’m back in the ATL and I’m, well, quite glad to be.
Went out there for a friend’s three-day-long bachelor party and had a really good time, but I gotta say, Vegas just ain’t my kind of town. I like going to cities to explore…to take them in…and this one just wants to take you in, it seems. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots to do if you have lots of money, and/or if you are willing to lose lots of said money, but I’m not really in a position these days to do that. Time to find more work! Make some more dough! Those are the thoughts that ran through my head all weekend, aside from the “wow, she really is wearing that/I’m only gonna buy one of these $22 drinks/why is it so impossible to sleep?” thoughts that permeated my time there.
I packed up and went out there with one carry-on bag, filled with some clothes and a pretty bare-bones photo kit that barely got used. For shame. Seems as if the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” mentality was pretty prevalent among my friends and therefore very few opportunities for snapping pics arose. There was one good one though:
Angel’s Landing, Zion National Park. I mentioned in my last post that I was gonna try and have a 10-year reunion with this hike, and fortunately we were able to get out of town the first day and do it. Good thing too; I’m not sure we would’ve had the energy/patience/wits about us had we done it later on. I was gonna go all Strobist and lug my flash and some off-camera lighting accessories up with us, so as to avoid pictures like this:
…where you don’t get very good fill lighting from the 2pm sun alone, but, after seeing what we were going to have to climb to reach the summit I decided otherwise. I wasn’t much liking the idea of dropping a nearly-new 580exII off a thousand-foot cliff:
…while trying to hold it in one hand and taking the 5D it was attached to in the other hand down with it. Nope, not gonna do it. It was really windy, and I have questionable balance sometimes anyway so I really needed to be holding onto that chain. All that said, I still managed to bang my camera against rocks more than a couple times, but thankfully no harm done. In the end I still got some good shots that you’ll be able to see on Flickr a little later tonight. And boy, was it beautiful! Just like I remember, but I think the weather was even better this time around.
A little note on taking photos this time: last time I was there, I had an Olympus OM-1 with semi-working exposure meter and I believe a 24mm lens. With film you can’t see what you just shot until (in the case of this hike) you’re gone (duh). But you know what? In those conditions, with bright sunlight and few places to step into shadow, the LCD on the back of my DSLR camera doesn’t really help out too much. I mean, it proves that the picture was taken, but it really doesn’t say too much about what the final product’s gonna be like, except a histogram that shows whether or not you’re in range (and I am trying my best to trust the histogram but it’s hard sometimes!…plus it’s really small on the image review screen; I don’t think there’s a way to change the size on the 5D). I took a lot more shots with the exposure-lock function than I’m used to doing because of exactly this, even though I wasn’t really moving the camera around all that much. I’m sure the newer models have better screens that are more usable in hard light, but, there will be no new models for me for a while. The point is that I read a really excellent post from Doug Menuez’s blog the other day titled “The Zen of Film vs. Digital Gratification” in which he was talking about trying not to rely on that LCD screen so much these days. “That LCD is crack”, says he. I think I get what he’s saying a little, although I’m nowhere near his level of expertise and really, really, do feel like I need a hit or two to learn more about the craft. Or maybe not. Film guys learning the craft 10 years ago (which I kind of tried to be) didn’t have this luxury. If the exposure’s right it’s right and what you need to be concentrating on is composition. Conversely, you can see your composition in the viewfinder before the shot so you should also be concentrating on getting that exposure right…being able to “know” it. I can pop off about 350 RAW images before my memory card fills, so a shot-by-shot review shouldn’t be necessary. Even so, I’ve got a lot to learn.
As for the rest of the Vegas trip, yeah, I’ve got a couple of other things that I’ll post to Flickr as well but nothing that I feel is blog-worthy. So yes, what happens, stays.
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