This somewhat rainy and windy weekend was our first camping trip of the season. We were at Laurelville for the Association Weekend, so it wasn’t really a camping trip with the exception that we slept in the camper. It was still a great time and felt good to be outside most of the day. While the girls napped, I managed to sneak away and get some biking and picture taking done. I tried to get some different views of the same waterfall.
My wife and I just returned from a week long Mission Trip in Jamaica. Together with other members from our Church, we all went down to visit, help out and worship with a Church in Jamaica. Most days were filled with building a swing set, doing maintenance work on the building, harvesting moringa tree’s or spending time with the local children. Being that I was designated the ‘photo guy’ by our team members, I had my camera on me the whole time to document the trip for our Church. With what little free time I had, along with a free day at the end of the week, I managed to sneak in some creative photography for myself. It was an eye opening trip and my wife and I can’t wait to go back.
On a side note, I packed very light and only took my X-E1 and 18-55mm lens with me. All shots were processed in Lightroom on my Windows 8 tablet. The combination was perfect for shooting and processing on the go. The bag I used was the Thinktank Turnstyle 10 and even when fully loaded, it never weighed me down. See my other post for more details on my travel kit.
With almost a foot of snow on the ground and the skies clearing up a bit, I headed out to Ohiopyle with a bag full of camera gear and a tripod. Nothing much to say about this, the beauty of it speaks for itself, much better in person obviously.
RAW vs. JPEG. This subject is bound to start almost as many fights as Nikon vs. Canon (neither!) and can be argued either way. Unlike the choice of two camera companies that produce almost identical products, the RAW vs. JPEG decision can have long lasting effects on your image library. Ever since I went beyond the Auto modes on my first DSLR, I have been shooting RAW. At first, it was a crutch because RAW files are much more malleable and can be massaged to hide mistakes in exposure, white balance and almost everything else but composition and focus. I’ve progressed now to using RAW so that I can develop the photograph after I take it and then worry about conversion to black and white, adding curves, clarity and so forth.
The downside to this approach is that every image needs attention to some extent. I do have a default preset for each of my camera’s that I apply on import into Lightroom, but I end up tweaking every image regardless. I’ve been experimenting on using the generated JPEG’s from my X-E1, but RAW has spoiled me. The JPEG’s are great and I think I could be perfectly happy with them, but after seeing what I can do with the RAW files, it’s tough to give up that control to a computer.
Anyway, on to the pictures. This weekend had me in Pittsburgh for a friends wedding, so I walked around the Pitt campus before the reception and then stopped at Mt. Washington after. Sunday I managed to find a few hours to get out hiking at Ohiopyle again. I stayed around the Ferncliff area and wanted to get some different angles of the main falls to see what I could come up with. The water was a bit low so there were some more places to go.
