The last spot we traveled to before heading home was Halong Bay, part of the Gulf of Tonkin. A green ocean spotted with tall limestone islands, Halong Bay is an amazing destination. We did a two day tour through Ocean Tours on the Hai Au Star, and loved it. It was the perfect blend of relaxation and activity. I wished we could stay a week. I need photos for more words…
Anna and I are back home from Cambodia and Vietnam. We are tired and dragging from the jetlag, but we both really enjoyed our time in the two countries. Never enough time, as usual. Will probably do some more writing about the two countries, as we didn’t spend much time in net cafes while we were there. Photos should start to come some time later in the week – it takes a while to sort and process them.
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to seeing the photos. Not to say the posts weren’t excellent (and very funny), but I’m curious to see what the new camera did for you.
I’m pretty happy with the camera so far, for the most part it was worth lugging around. I’m happy to report my ghetto messenger bag setup worked great. Quick to pull the camera out and put back in, and no one gave the bag second look after it got a bit dirty. I’m a little mad at myself for sometimes forgetting to take photos – I could have done some great portraits, but it only occurred to me after the fact. My people photo skills need more work – I’m always worried about inconveniencing someone or making a bad impression. I am getting better though.
The biggest issue right now is processing all the raw photos. I could be selective and just do some of the better ones. However I’m finding I have to go into Camera Raw from Bridge and uncheck auto exposure and brightness to see if the photo is worth keeping – Bridge automatically applies some of the default settings to the embedded jpgs.
The auto exposure and brightness really is really messing with a good number of the Angkor shots (anything taken between 9am – 4pm) – dark subjects, blown skies. Camera Raw likes to expose for the sky and not the subject. Of course if I was really on the ball I wouldn’t bother to photo outside of the golden hours. But I just didn’t have the time or motivation to restrict photo hours. Besides, then it stops being a vacation, and more like work.
I supposed I could always do two exposures from the raw and stitch them in Photoshop ala HDR. Going to be a lot of work to do that though. Maybe once I get through them all and pick out a couple key photos for that extended treatment. Learning lots about ACR, so hopefully future processing should be pretty speedy.
yeah, post-processing is way time consuming. That’s why I really like Aperture – their system of “versions” makes so much sense to me. I’m bummed that it’s not officially supported on the new MacBooks.