Why oh why would anyone go to Orlando in July I hear you ask? Great question. The answer is of course because that’s when the kids are off school 🙁

Sure it would be great to go in November or February, but we wanted to go for two weeks and with children in High School and Middle School you just can’t do that.

So Lisa planned this great vacation to Florida in what was probably the hottest month of the year.

The question is, did we have fun? Bloody right we did 🙂

For those who haven’t done this foolish vacation in July, I’ll explain the problem.

Firstly it’s hot. Now that in itself isn’t an issue, I mean when you go on vacation you want it to be hot right? The trouble is this isn’t really a “sit by a pool and read a book” vacation. This is a vacation where you are walking for around 14 miles a day around amusement parks packed with people.

I know what you’re thinking. “Hang on, that’s not so bad, I mean a bit of heat is OK, just drink water and wear sunscreen”. All true, but it’s not just the heat!

At this time of year the humidity is insane! It’s like walking through water.

Basically early morning it’s great. Really lovely outside. That is until around 10am. Then it starts to get “sticky”. This stickiness increases until by 2pm you are just miserable. All sweaty, uncomfortable and just feeling yuk.

You also can’t breath as it’s just nasty outside, it feels like it’s about to poor with rain.

That is until 4pm when the skies open and torrential rain comes down. Now I live in Seattle and it rains here, but not like it does in Florida.

In fact I think it rains more in one day in Florida that it does in a month in Seattle! It’s like someone pores a bucket of water over your head, continually for an hour!

So you get wet running from ride to ride. And this would be (you’d think) ok, coz it’s still warm outside, heck even the water is warm. But when you get to the ride, you walk into a heavily air conditioned line and your nipples fall off.

Fun eh?

So you keep going until you can’t stand it no more – one day we stayed until 1am.

Then you go back to your hotel and shower and feel amazing. But then you have to go out again to get some dinner.

I know I’m making this sound like some kind of torture, and in some ways it kind’a is, but the good news is you laugh A LOT and have a great time.

Lisa got us an apartment at a golf resort called “Reunion” here’s a link so you can check it out. It was basically FANTASTIC.

We had a three bedroom apartment and the resort had 9 different pools and a water park with a slide and lazy river!

It was also five miles from Disney so getting to the parks was super quick.

So what did we do while we were there?

We visited:

• Disney Magic Kingdom twice
• Disney Epcot twice
• Disney Hollywood Studios once
• Disney Animal Kingdom once
• Downtown Disney twice
• Universal Studios twice
• Universal Islands of Adventure twice
• Universal City Walk twice
• Busch Gardens once
• So we were pretty busy 🙂

So what did we like?

The Magic Kingdom was (as always) great. I don’t care how old you are, you just have a great time walking around the park. Splash Mountain, Space Mountain, Buzz Light year, It’s a Small World are our favorites.

Epcot I think is our favorite park. We loved it there so went twice. Just walking around the world sampling different foods was great fun and we had a blast with the different attractions.

Hollywood Studios was a bit of a let down. I seem to remember this being better but we didn’t have a great time there.

Animal Kingdom was great and Abi and I had a lot of fun on some of the water rides getting totally soaked. Also the safari drive around the park was super cool. I got loads of great pics on that but didn’t include them coz once you’ve seen an elephant…

Downtown Disney was a bit of a mess this year. They are carrying out some MAJOR refurbishment and there were road works everywhere and parking was a bit of a mess. I’m sure it will be great when it’s complete but I think they are easily a year away. Still we visited our favorite shops and stocked up the kitchen with new cups.

Universal should really be re-named “Harry Potter World” as that’s what it’s becoming. Now if you are not a potter fan you shouldn’t go (I think) but if you like it – wow it’s just amazing.

They’ve build Diagon Alley in Studio and Hogsmeade village in Islands of Adventure and you can take the train from Kings Cross to go from one to the other. This who experience is just amazing and you can’t fail to fall in love with the stories and characters again when you visit.

The attention to detail in both locations is ridiculous. I was in Hogsmeade and asked for a coke only to be told “sorry sir, we don’t sell Muggle drinks here” – Brilliant!

Other parts of both parks are great too, but for me (as a huge fan) it’s all about Potter.

The big disappointment for us this trip was Busch Gardens. It was really expensive ($100 each!) and all the animals were hiding and the ride lines made you want forever. A real shame as I seem to remember this as a great place to go years ago. I definitely won’t be going back.

That aside we had a fantastic vacation. Both James and Abi had a great time, even being stuck on two rides was cool (one in Epcot and one in Universal – although Abi didn’t like being stuck in Universal as we were way high up and a thunderstorm was coming in).

The place we stayed was fantastic and while it was super hot we had an excellent time.

Seriously can’t wait until we go back.

On a photography front, all I took was the X-T1 with my new 18-135mm lens and the X100T.  Some days I took one out, others I took the other.  Here’s the shocker – I had more fun with the X100T than the X-T1 and think that many of the images I took with that smaller cheaper camera are my favorites.

Here are some shots of each park.

Magic Kingdom

 

Epcot

 

Universal Studios

 

A few days after our Seattle visit we decided to go back. We thought it would be fun to watch the sun set over the city from the Columbia Tower.

The Columbia Tower is the tallest building in the city and is 943 feet high. It was build back in 2007 and cost a whopping $200 million. The tower has 76 floors and the story goes that the Architect (Chester Lindsey) wanted 76 to celebrate his fathers 76th birthday. However the height of the building was going to be too high and violated Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules as the building was under the approach flight path to SeaTac airport.

So Chester solved the problem by dropping the height of each floor by 2 inches, just getting under the approved height!

I have no idea if this is true but it’s a great story 🙂

Anyway the 73rd floor has a “Sky View Observatory” that costs $12 to visit and it gives you a panoramic view of the city.

We got to the tower about 8:30 (sun was supposed to set at 9pm) and I checked out the views.

My idea was to set the camera up on a tripod and start taking pictures as the sun was going down, and keep going until well after it had set and the city lights had come on.

For this shoot I had my 10-24mm ultra wide set to f/11 – that way I’d get everything in focus.

After walking round the building a couple of times I picked my spot shooting directly into the sun over the Olympics with the City (and Space Needle) in my foreground.

I put the camera on the Tripod, connected the shutter release cable and started taking pictures.

Now I should point out that I had my wife, two kids and father in-law (with his wife) with me. – I really should have thought this though, as by 9pm as the sun was going down they were all getting board!

So I had to keep apologizing as I wasn’t going anywhere for another half hour – at least!

So I just kept going.

I had a couple of close issues, my battery ran out at about ten past nine, so I had to change that without moving the camera, and a load of people kept coming by and got way too close to the setup.

Anyway by 9:30, my son came and told me that if I wanted to live I needed to pack up NOW – Lisa was not happy.

So I grabbed everything and we left with me hoping I had enough.

When we got home I started processing.

What I wanted was the sun going down over the mountains with a nice amount of light over the water, but with the city lights on. Obviously this is an impossible image as you can’t see both at the same time.

So it was clearly time for Photoshop magic.

In the end I picked two images. One at around 8:50 with the sun really low in the sky, and the other was the last one I took at 9:30.

I added some adjustments in Lightroom to both pictures to get a great sky and backdrop in one and a great city in the other, and then manually blended them together with layers and an overlay mask.

The end result is the image below.

OK, so this isn’t real, it’s art, but so is EVERY OTHER PICTURE like this you have ever seen 🙂 This is just my version.

It’s funny how when you live really close to a place how frequently you visit. I guess you keep telling yourself “I’ll go another day!” I lived 30 miles from London in the UK for many years and I never went into the city!

Well Seattle is kinda the same. We live no distance at all (it takes about 20 minutes to drive in) and we hardly ever go.

However recently we had some family visitors and we planned a day in the city. The weather was going to be beautiful so I grabbed my camera and off we went.

I had recently brought a new 18-135 lens for our upcoming Orlando vacation and decided to take the lens and check it out. Now it’s not that fast (f/3.5 when shooting at 18mm and drops down to f/5.6 as you zoom in) but the image quality seemed pretty good and as an all weather lens, it seemed a great choice for a family vacation.

As I’m a sucker for ultra wide lenses, I also took along my 14mm f/2.8 so I had some nice wide glass if I needed it.

I won’t bore you with all the family pictures (you will get enough of those when I go to Florida) so I just picked some nice pictures of the city.

I have to say I was REALLY pleased with the new lens. Sure yes it’s not as sharp as some of the primes I have, but being able to just point and shoot without having to keep changing lenses was great.

Lisa is not the most “patient” wife when I’m out with a lot of gear, so I’m adapting and trying to have to photographer persona’s.

There’s the version of me that takes loads of gear and spends lots of time taking the same image from different points of view with different glass, and there’s the husband who grabs the shot with one lens and moves on.

It was a lovely day and I got some nice shots of the city.

Looking forward to really putting the new lens through its paces when we go on our vacation.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything to my blog – I know I’m a bad photographer 🙁 The reality is work has been rather busy so I’ve spent a lot of time there and when I get home I’m just too tired to spend time writing up my day, plus my days just aren’t that interesting.

But I have been out and about with the camera, arguably not as much as I’d like but I do find time. So I thought I’d spend some time today doing some catching up – post some older entries with some pictures.

This posting is all about the Washington Skagit Valley Tulip festival. This takes place every year in April and May and is well worth going to.

They have fields and fields of tulips in full bloom and it’s beautiful.

Now I’ve been going for a few years now and have a few posts in this blog on my visits and I’m sure many of the pictures look the same (I mean how many different ways are there to shoot a Tulip?)

That said I took the camera and got some nice shots so thought I’d share. What was different this year though was that I leant Abi (my daughter) a camera and she took some pictures too.

After a first few shots I told her to come up with some interesting compositions as all her shots were from above looking down – basically what you would see if you went there and walked around. I showed her how I got down really low and also how tilting the camera (or just shooting up) can give a different perspective.

Well after that she went nuts! She was lying in the mud, turning the camera upside down and really coming up with some amazing shots. At the end of the day I learnt a few things from her 🙂

Unfortunately I don’t have her images to share, they are on her computer (probably just as well as some of her’s are more interesting than mine lol) but I think she has a talent here that I’ll continue to encourage.

Anyway, enjoy the images.

This weekend Lisa and Abi were out of town attending a gymnastics meet in Bellingham.  So I was left at home alone all day Saturday and most of Sunday.  Now I say alone, but that’s not really true as James was home too, but he lives in his room on his computer and I didn’t see him all weekend so I was basically alone.

So what to do?  One thing I did find out is that I suck without Lisa – it appears (don’t tell her this) that having her here telling me what to do all day actually keeps me busy.  Here I was, on my own, the whole weekend to myself and I didn’t know what to do.  Talk about “Trained”.

By Sunday afternoon I was literally going nuts – bored stupid.  So I’m on the internet reading one of my favorite Fuji camera sites http://www.fujix-forum.com and came across a post I found interesting.

The post was basically discussing the value of camera sensor size and whether a full frame sensor was that much better than a Fuji APS-C sensor (I told you I was bored).  Now I don’t expect you to understand any of this but I’ll tell you that the Fuji sensors are a little smaller than some professional high end digital cameras from Nikon and Canon (that’s all you really need to know).  Now I used to have one of those expensive high end larger sensor cameras and sold it to buy the Fuji gear I have to day.  I love my fuji cameras and think they are just as good as any Nikon or Canon.

The article was basically saying that with my camera when you take a portrait shot, you don’t get the “soft – out of focus” look the professionals like.  (This is called Bokeh.)  I don’t agree and have achieved this MANY times.  So I decided to do a test to show you can get nice bokeh in your pics.

But what to shoot?

As everyone was out I decided to try a self-portrait.  Now I should point out here that one of the reasons I take all the pictures in my family is that I don’t like having my picture taken.  So this was going to be “fun”.

So I got out my tripod, one of my nice portrait lenses, one light and a small soft box.  I set it all up in the dining room and got out my phone.  Yes that’s right, I got my phone which has an app that talks to my camera.  Using my phone I could stand in front of the camera, see on the phone what the camera was looking at, focus on the phone, look up and take the shot!  Cool eh?

This is basically what I did.  Of course I had to do it probably 30 times before I actually got a picture I half liked, but that’s it.  The end result is below and hopefully you can see the nice bokeh (soft focus) behind me in the garden.

Now as my whole family know I live in Photoshop and since I took this shot I’ve been asked several times if I “Photoshopped” the image.  I’m not quite sure what they are actually asking here.  Do they like the image and think I made me look better?  Or do they not like the image and think I should have made myself look better? Who knows.

The answer to the question however is YES.  The image was loaded into Photoshop and I sharpened it and added a vignette to make it look nice.  The rest is (unfortunately) all me.