Once a year or so, I get to tag along with my wife and travel to her work conferences. This time we were at the Greenbrier for a few days in West Virginia. It’s much more high class than I’m used too and the only thing I owned that fit in were my Billingham Hadley bags. The new lens is a Rokinon 12mm f/2 prime. I’ve been wanting an ultra wide angle for awhile, but couldn’t justify the price of the Fuji 10-24mm f/4. Every review I could on the Rokinon/Samyang 12mm was overwhelming positive and the price can’t be beat. In my first outing, it performed remarkably well.
During the day when I was on my own, I ventured out and took a hike around Sandstone Falls in the New River Gorge National Park. I managed to arrive before the sun cleared away the fog and low lying cloud cover, which added some darker atmosphere to the pictures.
Since I was working on a tripod for all of these shots, I decided to test out the new Panorama Merge feature in Lightroom 6. This panorama is from 5 shots that it stitched together.
Once back at the Greenbrier I still had some time to walk around and enjoy the old world charm of the buildings.
It feels as if the past month has been nothing but freezing temperature’s and snow. Today however, that changed just a bit for half the day when the mercury got above 40 and all that snow and ice started to melt. It rained for most of the day as well. Reports started coming in about local streams, creeks and rivers being inundated with loads of extra water. Once I finished working, I grabbed a camera, lens and tripod and off I went to a local creek to see it for myself.
Starting in the early afternoon, the temperature started to drop again and the rain turned to snow. The light was fading fast so I set up my tripod, attached my remote shutter and prayed that the weather sealing on the X-T1 and Fuji 18-135mm would keep the water out.
ISO was locked at 200 and the aperture set to f/8 (and be there). Shutter speeds varied between 3 seconds at the beginning and once the light was about gone it slowed down to 13 seconds. The camera and lens seems to have weathered the snow/rain combo without issue.
While the past few weeks in south-west Pennsylvania has been quite frigid, today it warmed up just a bit and the sun made an appearance. This made for a nice hike around Ohiopyle. Having read that Cucumber Falls was totally frozen over, I decided to take a trip down to the Cascades as well as Jonathan Run Falls since I have never been to those in winter. Both of those were almost all iced up as well.
For this trip, I packed very light since I wanted to test out my new Fuji 18-135mm lens. I left my primes at home, which made for a compact and lightweight kit. Basically all I had was the X-T1, 18-135mm, Variable ND Filter, batteries, memory cards and my Benro Travel Angel tripod. Everything seemed to work great and even though the lighting was rather harsh (due to the time of day and a cloudless sky), the pictures were what I was hoping for. I am ready for it to warm up and for Spring to arrive.
