Kathy & I visited the Dream Car Museum in Evansville, Indiana on our recent jaunt through the Midwest. Here are a few photos from that visit. For anyone who wants to see even more car photos, I’ve added a gallery in Adobe Portfolio with an expanded selection.
One of my favorite questions from friends and neighbors is “so, where are you off to next?” One of our neighbors is certain that we’re trying to spend all of our retirement dollars on vacations, but since we like having a place to come home to, we only spend part of it! 😉 I guess we’ve developed a well-earned reputation, and one that we’re just a bit proud of. 🙂
In a few days Kathy & I will be setting out to bag a few more states on our path toward 50. We’re looking forward to cooler temperatures and meeting up with some friends along the way. I plan to send “Postcards” from the road as we go, although they likely won’t be daily. Stay tuned!
The third “new” state on our recent DelMarVa excursion was New Jersey. We debated how to do New Jersey, realizing that the state is very diverse in terms of urban vs. rural, city vs. shore, crowded vs. not so crowded. At first we were thinking in terms of Atlantic City or Wildwood, but then we discovered (or remembered) Cape May.
While just barely in New Jersey, and the very southern tip of the peninsula, Cape May represented “enough” of New Jersey for us to say that we had visited. Nothing wrong with visiting the rest of the state, but we like to do things our way, and finding a town where we could park the car and leave it for a few days suits us. And Cape May fit that bill just fine.
Cape May is recognized as the country’s oldest seaside resort, and the beach has been recognized by many “Top 10” lists, including the Travel Channel. Beach Avenue is lined with amazing homes – hilariously called “cottages” although they are often huge! – and hotels. Very little to no chain restaurants or hotels. They don’t even have a McDonald’s, a Starbucks or a Walmart! Our kind of place.
Other than the fact that our hotel was full of families enjoying one last hurrah before school started, complete with loud, misbehaving children, we enjoyed our visit very much. The great part is that we spent most of our day walking around town while they were at the beach or the pool, and by the time we got back and showered for cocktails and dinner, all of the noisy families were headed off to dinner. Ahhhh!
Three days in New Jersey were plenty, we’re glad we went and glad to say we were there. And here are a few photos to prove it!
Waxing crescent moon over Charlotte, NC tonight!
Reflections of the sky and clouds in cars that I found while on the Cape May Ferry from Cape May, NJ to Lewes, DE. I was standing on the deck above the cars.
I’ve been cleaning up some old folders and came across some abstracts from 2014 that I hadn’t processed. Interesting what saw then, and what I see when I revisit old photos.
For our recent visit to Waynesville I rented another camera – the Fuji X-T3. It’s the latest version of my existing camera, the X-T1, and I wanted to see how it compares. It was an interesting experiment, with mixed feelings. The Folkmoot photos from my previous post were taken with that camera, and here are a few more.
All in all, the camera would be a worthy upgrade from the X-T1 if I happened to be in the market. But I’m not. The obvious reason would be cost, because in addition to the camera itself I would need to upgrade my memory cards, buy new batteries (my current batteries fit but have a lower power output so will supposedly not last as long), buy a new L-bracket and eventually – because of the 26MP files vs. my current 16MP – I would need to buy larger hard drives. Sorry, that would cover the cost of a nice vacation!
Another, albeit minor, negative would be the slightly larger size of the X-T3 body. In my opinion the X-T1 borders between just right and a little large (weird to say since my initial impression 4 years ago was that it was tiny compared to the Canon 5D!).
On the positive side, the files were quite nice, although I wasn’t blown away by a huge difference between the newer camera and mine. There is definitely a slight improvement in detail, and I found that with files almost twice as large, zooming in to 50% instead of 100% is far enough. Any closer than 100% just accentuates the flaws, and I don’t need to accentuate them any more, thank you!
The menus are a bit more complex, necessary due to the customization the camera allows. But it wasn’t impossible to figure out, probably because I’m already used to the setup. I liked being able to see blinking highlights in the viewfinder, which I can’t do with my current camera. That’s not a big deal but it is helpful in certain situations. The EVF is nice and bright, and contains all of the information found on the main screen.
One of the things I should have paid more attention to is the ability to set different autofocus parameters based on specific shooting situations. I tried tracking subjects in the parade but found a lot of missed shots because I didn’t have it set up correctly. That’s not something I usually do, so I didn’t think about it until after the fact.
So, no new cameras for me – yet! Although those new Canon point & shoots are due out any time…hmmmm! 😉
Kathy & I are spending some time in Waynesville, NC trying to beat the heat in Charlotte. We’ve driven some curvy mountain roads during our sightseeing. This is a scene I have passed by many evenings without a camera, and decided to take one along last night just to capture a few shots.
Kathy & I were talking to friends recently who asked me about our travels to Italy, when I remembered that I had never published a gallery of Italy photos on my website. It’s only taken a year, but I finally got around to it. It’s a lot of photos – admittedly way more than I would ordinarily put in one gallery. But it was a huge trip with lots of photos! I ended up with about 3,000 processed photos, so a gallery with “only” 180 or so images is really editing it down!
As much as Kathy & I like to explore new places, there is a certain comfort in the familiarity of places we return to often. Such is the case with our recent visit to Belhaven, in eastern North Carolina. Whenever we visit that area, we return to places like Swan Quarter, perhaps best known as the location of the ferry to Ocracoke Island, but also the location of a number of fishing companies and their boats. Englehard is also the location of an inlet that houses a number of fishing boats. Lake Mattamuskeet is the location of a number of interesting places and the photographs that can be made there.
While I rarely return with anything truly new, it is a good place to go and look for things I haven’t seen previously. Storms wash away old piles of debris and sometimes bring in new subject matter. Businesses come and go and sometimes the change in decor can mean new material. Sometimes returning to a place with fresh eyes can mean new opportunities.
This is another collection of photos from the Leica D-Lux 7 that I took on our recent visit there. I’ve got a few more batches that I’ll post once I’ve worked out the words to go along with them!
