Photos from today

I took the D50 out today to run it through some paces. I’m enjoy­ing shoot­ing with it quite a bit. Today I went and shot tourist pho­tos, basi­cal­ly. I went to Ocean Beach and took pic­tures at a cou­ple of points along the way, then went up above the Cliff House for the sunset.

While I was shoot­ing, I was fas­ci­nat­ed by the waves. They were pret­ty big today. But when I got those pic­tures home and looked at them, I could­n’t help but think that all these pic­tures of waves were pret­ty bor­ing. I even risked admo­ni­tion by a ranger by cross­ing into a fenced-in “dan­ger­ous area” so that I could get low­er and clos­er to the rocks and the spray. That did­n’t real­ly help, but it was fun get­ting the shots.

It’s not sur­pris­ing at all how pos­si­ble it is to get washed out areas and dark sil­hou­ettes in the same pho­to when you’re fac­ing the Sun.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yes, When I was con­sid­er­ing the D200 instead of the D50, I thought that 5 shot per sec­ond burst mode would be a big sell­ing point over a 2.5 shot per sec­ond burst mode. Well, I can’t get over how fast two and a half shots per sec­ond is. Every dig­i­tal cam­era I’ve ever used before has not only tak­en a few sec­onds to cycle and be ready to shoot again, but also there’s usu­al­ly a half to a full sec­ond between the push­ing of the but­ton to the actu­al shot. With the dSLR, it’s just click and that’s when the shot gets tak­en. 2.5 shots per sec­ond meant that I could see the pro­gres­sion of a crash­ing wave in stop-motion. That’s just real­ly real­ly cool. Oh, and with the mem­o­ry card I used today I can take 13 pic­tures in burst mode before the buffer fills. My new Ultra II SD card arrived today and a quick test shows that I can shoot con­tin­u­ous­ly for 30 shots before the buffer fills. And then it slows down to one shot every sec­ond. I was skep­ti­cal about pay­ing the extra bucks for the ‘Ultra II’ card, but now I’m glad I did.

Run­ning from the ocean This shows the scale of the waves today, and I think the down­ward slant and the fish­er­man’s retreat makes the whole thing pret­ty funny.	Cami Late Afternoon My Moto Guzzi in sil­hou­ette as the sun drops low behind.
Bloom among the rhododendron Hey, it’s a lit­tle washed out, but I think it lends a sense of atmosphere.	All He Surveys Waves crash­ing below a gull
Sun Plunges Into Sea Nuclear bomb det­o­na­tion over the Far­ral­lons. No, kid­ding. Just anoth­er sun­set photo.	Bro­ken Steps They have not main­tained this area well. Maybe that’s why there was a locked cor­don and a sign read­ing “Area Closed”.
Area Closed Yeah, you know I went down there.	Damn that lens flare This would have been my favorite of the pic­tures I took Jan­u­ary 19th except for the pesky green blobs.
Sutro Baths The remod­el­ing of the Sutro Baths is.… well, min­i­mal­ist I guess you’d say.	Sun, Water, Bird, Rock There’s the Sun, the Pacif­ic Ocean, a bird and a rock. Title says it all, really.
Sun­down San Fran­cis­co has now rotat­ed to the side of the plan­et away from the Sun.