Traverse City

At the time of this posting I'm staying in Traverse City on vacation. My family rented this excellent house on a lake. It has the most intense landscaping ever and it's pretty excellent. Hopefully I'll remember to take some pictures of the place before I leave.

On Sunday my boyfriend and I went into town to do some things. First we played some disc golf at one of the local courses. Normally it's a ski area in the winter so it was fairly hilly, but I enjoyed it overall even though I wasn't playing well and got slightly grumpy. My impression of the place probably improved when I overshot a 361 ft hole, making for the longest drive I've done so far. It may have been a shot downhill, but I'm counting it anyways. Then I finally got a birdie on the last hole with about a 160 foot approach around some trees that miraculously went in the basket. Sadly there are no pictures from that because the prospect of carrying my camera along with my disc bag along a hilly course and having to stop to take it out every hole/shot sounds tedious and I'm just not that ambitious.

But after the disc golf we drove up the peninsula to the Old Mission Point Lighthouse.

[The lighthouse]

[View of the entire lighthouse]

[Lee walking out into the lake. I would have liked to join him, but my camera stays on dry land, so I just creeped on him from a distance]

[Looking at something]

[Some girl out in the water]

[Hey, Rocks! Yeah!]

Next came water skiing:

[For some reason we let Andy drive the boat]

[My brother slalom skiing]

[Falling! haha]

[Dad water skiing]

[Pretty]

So there is the beginning of my vacation. Sadly I didn't get any pictures from today, like when I beat Lee at mini golf. Or when I went to an old mental hospital that has been converted into shops, businesses and housing, creepy, yet pretty sweet.

Finally, Vacation

I'm finally on vacation for the first time since last year May. I'm only gone for three days, but it's excellent.

Last night I went down to Pentwater's beach to watch the sunset. It was really beautiful. I quickly discovered that I am dumb and the autofocus option on my lens is really easy to use, I was just really impatient last time I tried to use it. So I turned autofocus on, but then for some reason I turned it off, and forgot that it was off, so quite a few of my pictures were slightly out of focus. I'm dumb.

But here are some pictures from last night. None of them are overly awesome, I was just trying to enjoy the night, not too worried about taking masterpieces.

[This was my favorite]

[the colors aren't as intense in this one, but I like the cloud]

[Colors in this one are awesome]

[So I have this thing against people who think they are artistic just because they tilt their camera when they take pictures. Which I'm not saying it can't be, it's just when people think it's the only way to be artistic and they do it all the time, it bothers me. My boyfriend joked with me to do it.....and then I ended up kind of liking this shot... but I only took one, so it's safe. Right?]

Yay, vacation!

First attempt at street photography...Meh.

Tonight I went downtown to a free music event in Grand Rapids called Blues on the Mall. I met my cousin and her husband down there and decided it would be a good time for me to attempt street photography. Actually I don't even know if this really qualifies as street photography, but whatever, it was practice of some sort.

I didn't feel too weird having a camera strapped around my neck because quite a few people had cameras. Granted most people had tiny little point and shoot cameras, or the cameras in their phones, so mine was a bit bigger than the average. I was trying to force myself to take pictures of people, yet I was afraid to have them notice me doing so. I ended up not taking very many pictures, but hey... it's a start.

[this dude was just dancin' it up all night, he was pretty hilarious to watch]

[Biker dude and wife thought he was funny enough to take videos of on their phone]

[Some shirtless guy joined in on the dancing fun, sadly all my shots of them dancing didn't turn out, so here they are hugging...aww. Also while editing this I noticed the couple kissing in the background... oops]

[Guy in the red: the hair on the top of his head looks real right...?]

[Speaking of hair....this dude... I just don't even know what to say about the bald-hawk. I also noticed that, thanks to the angle of this shot and the woman standing behind this man, it makes him look like he has quite the rack...haha]

[Some woman trying to keep the sun out of her eyes, her family saw me trying to take a picture one time, I got scared and waited until they all walked away to try again]

[I thought the reflection of a building in another building was cool....Buildingception.]

None of my shots today were any masterpieces. I was more worried about being inconspicuous than taking super excellent pictures. Ironically my lens has an autofocus option, which seems like it would make taking pictures easier, but apparently I'm dumb because I can't get it to work right, my shots with autofocus on were actually not in focus at all. I had to work the rest of the night in manual focus and I wasn't doing so hot at quickly adjusting it and I missed a few cool things, but learning! Basically today was more practice of getting over my fear of having people seeing me taking pictures, especially of other people.

Tomorrow I'm going on a mini vacation to a beach town and hopefully I'll remember I own a camera and get some stuff while I'm away.

To all you Star Wars fans, I saw this today and thought it was awesome:

New Camera Fun-ness

Well if you didn't read my last post, this past Thursday I got a new camera. It's a Nikon dSLR and it's all mine. No more making my dad share his camera with me; I'm sure he'll be very glad to get his back.

So far one thing that is the main difference between this Nikon and my dad's Olympus is the focusing on the lens. The Olympus was mostly an autofocus lens with some minor focus. So it would focus and then there was a ring I could turn that would slightly change the focusing, but it never seemed like much. Now my Nikon lens has full manual focusing, which is awesome! But I am out of practice so unfortunately quite a few pictures I took today didn't have the focusing right.
Then obviously things like the menus and button layouts are different, but that's no big deal. I will give Olympus props for having probably the most through camera manual ever. It's about four times the size of my Nikon one and has way more explanations of pretty much everything on the camera.

Today I went to another park(what a surprise). I always feel silly going to a populated area by myself with my camera, so I usually stick to nature trails in parks where there are fewer people. Today I used manual mode on my camera with manual focus. Which of course doing that leads to some bad shots, but it's fun and good practice so I do it anyway. Now here are some of the things I found on my walk:

[I took quite a few shots of this grassy stuff. It took me a few tries to get the focusing right. Partly because I was sitting on some funky hill and swatting bugs off me every two seconds... along with the whole new camera thing]

[A fly]

[I think this picture is a bit overwhelming and therefore not that great. What do you think?]

[A stump, I had to take a picture of it]

[Thoughts on this one too...I'm not sure how I feel about the harsh sunlight]

[Some creepy, old, abandoned building.]

[Had some fun with the reflections in this lake]

So there you have it, some of my first pictures with my new camera. I am very thrilled with it so far and I think it is going to be a fabulous camera. Too bad I can't afford all the other lenses and sweet accessories I want yet.

For serious I will hopefully have some new subjects soon. I need to stop being a chicken and go into populated areas, like downtown Grand Rapids, and find something new to photograph. Including people...