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Articles Tagged with: vacation

Vacation Wrap-Up

iPhone 4S

I took the family to Orlando, FL for spring break, and I was armed only with my iPhone and my point & shoot Nikon P7000. We were traveling with our neighbors and we had a blast! We spent most of our time at Disney World, with a one day trip to Universal Studios for my son and I to get our inner Harry Potter out.

Nikon P7000

Nikon P7000

Nikon P7000

In the past when we went to the amusement parks for vacations, I’d lug around my DSLR and try to get cool shots. What I wasn’t doing was spending time having fun with my family! The shots we always looked at afterwards weren’t the artsy shots of some ride or topiary or whatever – The shots we went back to were of our loved ones having fun. So, I made lots of use of my iPhone’s crappy front-facing camera and got lots of shots like these:

iPhone 4s (front facing camera)

iPhone 4s (front facing camera)

iPhone 4s (front facing camera)

Since I had my point and shoot P7000 with me, I didn’t hesitate to hand it over to strangers and loved ones to take shots with, such as these:

Nikon P7000 – Photographer – My Wife Amy

Nikon P7000 – Photographer: Our Waiter

Nikon P7000 – Photographer: Some Dude With A Monopod

We also were treated to a marathon version of “The Twist” by the one and only Chubby Checker!

Nikon P7000

The moral of today’s post? Have fun and the good shots will follow! That and I’ve caught some awful bug while I was there. I swear, the contagion that will wipe out the world will start at Disney World. Oh yeah, and my MacBook Pro officially died while I was there. I’m awaiting it’s return from Apple land.

iPhone 4S Front Facing Camera

If you’re brave, you can sift through all of the gory photos here.

Family Vacation Photos 2011

I just sat down with my family and my visiting mother to do the old-fashioned post-vacation slide-show deal where we sat in front of the TV and went through our trip pictures shot by shot, reliving the adventures all over again. It brought me back to my childhood when my Grandfather would break out his slide projector and we’d shut the lights and close the curtains to watch them up on his portable movie screen. The technology has changed but the tradition remains, and I thought I would share some of the hi-lights of our recent trip with you.

Our trip started out at Universal Studios in Orlando, FL (I had a previous post with some of my shots of Hogwarts here). Our first stop was Olivander’s Wand Shop, where my daughter Mackenzie was chosen to be the wizard who gets to have a wand choose her.

While we were there mainly for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, we did take advantage of the rest of the park, including Jurassic Park.

Kegan posed nicely on this typical photo attraction:

After a long day in Orlando, we drove over to Tampa to stay the night before embarking on our cruise. I shot this from our hotel room just after the sun went down:

The next morning, we woke up early and got some last minute shopping for stuff we forgot to pack and then headed onto the boat. We ate a quick lunch and greased our vacation wheels a bit with some umbrella drinks, followed by a jump in one of the pools. Luckily I had my Pentax Optio W80 in my pocket all charged up and ready to shoot.

Kegan stole some kisses from his mommy in the hot tub, while Mac took a spin on the slide:

As we departed from Tampa, I tried to get all artsy with the port scenes using my D90 with a 55-300mm lens.

As we left Tampa, we had to go under the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which our cruise ship, the Carnival Legend, clears by only five feet.

The sunsets heading into the Caribbean are always a must-see show.

We spent a day at sea relaxing by the pool, drinking fruity cocktails, and eating soft-serve. Kegan shows us here how to walk on water:

Our first port call was in Mexico on the island of Cozumel. We woke up next to another huge cruise ship across the dock.

The plan for the day was to ride ATV’s through the jungle. Here I am with Mackenzie on our ATV adventure:

And here’s Kegan under a hole inside a cave followed by a shot of him holding a baby crocodile:

Here I am, all dusty and sweaty as we hike through some Mayan ruins wearing my Wild Tours helmet:

That was a blast. I wish I had grabbed a shot of Amy holding a python, which is something to behold if you know how much she hates snakes, but they asked us not to take pictures of their snake. The next day we visited Belize where we went cave tubing courtesy of CaveTubing.BZ.

We had to hike a mile through caves and the jungle with our tubes in hand.

After about 40 minutes of walking, eating fallen coconuts, and tasting termites, we arrived at the launching point.

We ventured into the dark caves, linked together, lazily meandering through the Nohoch Che’en Caves Branch Archaeological Reserve.

After the long journey, we were treated to lunch and all-you-can-drink Rum punch back at cavetubing.bz’s compound.

Before we got back on the ship, Mackenzie had to get some braids in her hair by the infamous Ruth Smith.

The next day brought us to the island of Roatán, where I awoke early to catch the sunrise as we pulled into the shipwreck ridden bay.

After a crazy taxi ride, we arrived at the Bananarama Beach Resort on West Bay Beach to hang out and do some snorkeling.

Amy & Mackenzie got to take a ride on the banana boat, where the whole island could hear Mackenzie yelling “BANANA!!!” at the top of her voice:

Since the West Bay Beach is a public beach, there was no shortage of locals trying to earn a buck from the tourists. These guys were at the least entertaining. Why not make a hat on the end of a dock or maybe catch a barracuda with your bare hands?

The kids had fun swimming out to the floating platform, and jumping off it as well.

The water was fantastically perfect. This was the one day I brought my D90 with me on the excursion and I couldn’t of picked a better place to make photos of paradise. I was able to do a little photo-walk on the beach alone for a little while and take in the sights.

At one point in the afternoon, my wife called me out of the water and told me to look up. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a full rainbow encircling the sun! I wanted to find an element to place it and decided that having the sun peek out from the palm fronds would be the perfect Caribbean scene.

Phew… only one more shore excursion to go. Here’s a shot of Kegan in our cabin making plans for the evening:

The next day brought us to Grand Cayman.

We decided to take it easy and took a quick cab ride to Calico Jack’s where I bought a bucket of local beer and floated in the ocean for a few hours.

We had one last day at sea before we returned to Florida. Here’s Amy getting ready for dinner:

I couldn’t resist taking a photo of one of the photographers that lined the sides of the atrium on the way to the restaurant.

On the last night, I took my wife outside to do our own photo-shoot. Here’s my favorite of the batch:

After spending a week with your service staff and if you’re lucky to get good people helping you out, you can’t help but get attached to them. Here’s Fernando & George with Mackenzie & Amy:

And this concludes my vacation presentation. I remember enjoying those “boring vacation photos” as a kid. Our vacations would go by quickly, but the photos brought us right back whenever we would view them.

Many of the pictures featured here were taken on my little Pentax point-and shoot, which, for a tiny little camera with a tiny little sensor, can be a convenient way to freeze your dirty, wet, and hot memories forever. That sounded dirty. Anyway, as usual, I have a slew of photos on my Flickr set.

My Favorite Shot From Vacation

Last week I was enjoying some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday with my family at Disney World. I posted some of my more “artsy” shots in an article earlier this week and mentioned that I still haven’t shown you my favorite shot of the trip. The shot at the top of this article was the result of the perfect storm of outdoor lighting. Most of my shots from that day during that time were in very hard mid-day sunlight. At one point, the clouds behind me covered the sun, while the sky in the background was a very saturated blue. I quickly looked around for a spot and saw some kids running around on this grassy hill (which I don’t think they wanted people walking on). In a mini panic, I begged everyone in our party to get up on the hill for a family portrait. Below is the shot of everyone that was available to me. After that, I knew the clouds were moving and I told everyone to do something silly, like jump, before the light changed. Well, that lost a few of my models, but I managed to grab the shot above regardless. I particularly enjoy the contrast of the boys vs. girls. The girls gave 100%, while the boys halfheartedly lifted one leg each.

I’m almost done sorting through my vacation pictures, I’ve got well over 100 of them in a set on my Flickr page.

Not much else to report as I’ve been buried at work this week, I just wanted to quickly share those two photos with you. When the light is right, you need to take advantage of it (even if you look like a raging maniac in the eyes of your loved ones when it happens).

Making Art On Vacation

One of the benefits of being a photographer and going on vacation is being in a place you don’t experience every day. On the other hand, one of the obvious problems in visiting a vacation destination is trying to make something new in a place that everyone shoots! No other place defines that issue more to me than Disney World. You can’t take a step without seeing someone with a camera up to their eye. From cell phones to the most expensive DSLR’s on the market, it’s a safe bet to say that Disney World is the most photographed vacation destination in the world. So how do you make something new while visiting a place like that?

I look at a place like this as a great way to further define your style, because that is the only thing that will separate your shots from the tens of thousands of other shots taken every day. What can you inject into a scene that makes it yours?

It can be overwhelming when you start to think that you are photographing a mostly man-made environment – how are you making art out of someone else’s art? That is what photography is all about! Capturing images of life the way you see and interpret them. You’re telling a story with your own voice, even if it’s a retelling of another person’s tale.

Adding your loved ones into an interesting background is a no-brainer, but how about making them a part of the artwork by composing them as an element in it?

I personally like to look for shapes and textures in a place like this – especially during those harsh mid-day hard-lit hours. You can shoot in every type of light, but you need to work within its limitations while exploiting its positive points.

When looking for design elements, you can always make a decent picture much better by adding an element that sticks out, such as people. I started shooting this scene and even though I loved the color and angles, I was bored with it until I asked my daughter and her cousin to sit off on the side of the wall.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, I also love to shoot in low light. I composed this shot and used the guard railing inside Space Mountain to brace the camera as my son awaited the last ride of the evening (and our vacation).

This photo was made by holding the camera steady against the fender of the car/table directly in front of my family’s seats at the Sci-Fi Diner.

When you don’t have anything to act as a makeshift tri-pod, you can get low to steady your elbows on your legs, shoot wide open and crank up the ISO. This shot was done at f/2.8 and ISO 1600. I had to take quite a few of this scene to ensure that at least one of them would be acceptably sharp. It’s digital, it doesn’t cost you anything to let the shutter fly, but you can loose everything you’re trying to say if you’re not generous with your disk space in extreme shooting conditions such as this.

There are plenty of opportunities on vacation to relax and stretch your creative mind out while behind the lens. Go ahead and try new stuff while opening your eyes a bit wider to find the shots that most people might skip over. I still haven’t shown you my favorite shot that I took on this trip, but I have hundreds of photos to go through. I promise to share it with you this week as I get more time – the sucky part of returning home from vacation is all of the work that piles up in your absence, so I’ve got a busy week ahead of me.