Tag Archives: travel photography

May 15, 2017 · 5:35 am

Puerto Vallarta 2017 — Part 1

Flying the Flag

We’ve done Puerto Vallarta many times on the blog, and in January Ursula and I returned yet again. So I’m going to try something a bit different over the next two weeks with this return look at one of my favorite Mexican destinations. Rather than waste time on text, I’m going to take you on a strictly visual tour, with the best photos from this trip appearing over the next two Fun Photo Fridays. If you’d like an explanation of what you’re seeing, I’ll post links to previous articles on Puerto Vallarta below each day’s gallery. As for the gallery photos, just click on any image to bring up an enlarged, captioned photo and to begin each day’s slide show.

Seating Arrangement

Frigatebird in Flight

Hourglass

Riding the Blue

Hornblower

Ruby Princess

For additional reading and photographs of Puerto Vallarta:

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Filed under Photography, R. Doug Wicker, travel, vacation

Tagged as photography, Puerto Vallarta, R. Doug Wicker, travel, travel photography

May 5, 2017 · 5:35 am

Fun Photo Friday — Whale Watching Tour Favorites

The Flag “Waves”

As I noted earlier this week, the whales on this tour were not very cooperative, but there was much to photograph anyway. It should be no surprise, then, that my favorite photos from this tour had nothing to do with whales.

Cruisin’

One of the tricks to capturing fun images is mentally cropping what you see and determining if the composition is interesting. Sometimes monochromatic subjects can actually work in your favor, and without the need to converting to Black & White:

Blue on Blue

Silky reflections on glassy waters don’t hurt, either:

Red Bench

Here are a couple of more photographs that made my “favorites” list:

Ready to Roll

Solitude

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Tagged as Fun Photo Friday, gray whales, Hornblower Cruises, photography, R. Doug Wicker, San Diego whale watching, travel, travel photography, vacation, whale watching

May 3, 2017 · 5:35 am

San Diego for Whale Watching — Part 2

Flagship Marietta

For the next couple of hours we chased whales . . . at a distance. If one of the tour boats in the area observed a whale, the whole fleet would reposition close, but not too close, to that area. Regulations require whale watching boats to approach no closer than 100 yards/90 meters.

Gray Whale

Fortunately, I had with me a Panasonic FZ1000, which has a 35mm equivalent focal range of 400mm, or about 8x telephoto magnification.

Gray Whale

The FZ1000 is a very versatile travel camera with a fairly large 1-inch sensor in a relatively compact form. The drawback is that at its finest JPEG compression, the photos tend to show blotchiness in uniform areas, such as blue sky. Also, vignetting at the corners is a bit of a problem, especially at the longest focal lengths. Both problems can be solved if you store images in both JPEG and Raw, allowing you to replace the occasional defective JPEG through Raw post-processing with the Silkypix software that comes packaged with the camera. That’s a pain, but fortunately most JPEGs from the FZ1000 aren’t bad enough to require fixing.