My 2015 Vacation, Part 1 of 7

This blog, or likely series of blogs, is more of a personal note and not thoroughly related to photography although photography does play a part. I mentioned this trip in my previous blog, and I elaborate more here. I wanted to write about my travels, however, and this is the best place I have to do it...

My Reasons

I had three reasons to plan and take a trip in August of 2015. First, and the least significant, is that my birthday is at the beginning of the month and I usually try to take some time off. Not for any other reason than it is a selfish present to myself and for the last couple of years I drive somewhere and take some photographs. And, there aren't any other holidays in August so I wouldn't have any time off of work without this present.

This year, however, there were two additional reasons. Important reasons.

Selfie at Seal Rock, Oregon

This year marked my 40th high school graduation anniversary and reunion from Port Angeles Senior High School in Washington. I had never been to a high school reunion, in part because I'd never received the notice or invitation, in part because I never tried to find out about the reunions in previous years, and in part because I haven't had much connection to high school classmates.

I am not a big fan of Facebook, and have many questions about how it can truly be worth much on the stock exchange, why they do some of the software design things they do, etc., but I can't deny that I would not have established a communication channel with high school classmates without it. I have become Facebook friends with a number of classmates over the previous years and have really enjoyed communicating with them and sharing pictures. It has made me FEEL. I have felt comfort, kinship, familiarity, sadness, and joy, to list a few feelings, as I’ve read about their problems, successes, and experiences in the town I went to high school as well as the other towns or cities they live in currently.

This year was also the year things have worked out well for my son Ryan and as a result he announced he and his wonderful partner Kara were going to get married in August. He and Kara had been together for some years, living in Portland, Port Townsend, and now in Suquamish, Washington which is about 65 miles from Port Angeles. They discussed it with me and set the date so that it didn’t conflict with my high school reunion to ensure I could attend. The thought of that consideration and desire makes me tear up still. I feel so very lucky to have Ryan think that highly of me especially since he lived most of his childhood with his mother.

I requested the time off early in the year and in June and July I started making plans for the trip. I took the week off leading up to the reunion, which I attended events on Friday and Saturday, August 7^th and 8^th. Ryan and Kara were getting married the following Friday, August 14^th. I took most of the week after the 14^th off to give myself time to get back to Phoenix, work on some photography post processing, and to “ease” back into returning to work.

I planned to drive the trip, heading up as much of the Pacific coast as possible with the hopes of capturing some photographs, and arriving in Port Angeles on Friday the 7^th. After the reunion I planned to go to Suquamish and spend a few days with Ryan and Kara before leaving for the wedding on Wednesday, August 12^th. I planned to stay with my sister in law Linda but as it turned out, I stayed with my daughter Jessica in Newberg, Oregon, who needed some company. I hoped to also meet some other friends while in the Newberg area before returning to Phoenix. The Microsoft “bing” map website estimated the trip at about 3,400 miles, not counting any local driving I might do.

Elmer watching me prepare for the trip

To be honest, I had some worries when planning the trip. I felt old. I hadn’t been notably outside of Arizona for maybe 5 years, and hadn’t been away from home for that amount of time since moving to Phoenix in 2001. I certainly hadn’t planned an itinerary of that scale for years. I had questions about which route to take, where to stay, how far I could drive in a day while trying to take pictures. I had a big concern about not having my dog Elmer with me; Elmer always accompanies me on my weekend photography excursions.

For some time I have made some of my weekend trips by simply sleeping in the back of my Ford Explorer (Ryan calls it and “Exploder”). I often set out on trips planning to do just that but I find that as night draws close I end up looking for a camping ground and sometimes end up getting a motel room. I just don’t want to try to settle in somewhere and then either get woke up by traffic or other noise, or by a police officer who says I can’t sleep at that location. I know how I don’t feel very good the following day if I don’t get some good sleep. My eyes burn and I just feel miserable overall and it doesn’t end up being conducive to taking photographs.

I ended up deciding I’d spend the first night in northern California at a truck stop sleeping in the Exploder but after that I’d be at the coast for 4 nights. I made campground reservations for 2 of the nights. I figured I’d deal with the first night at the coast when I got there, and for the last night at the coast the place I called said I didn’t need a reservation (more on that later). Then I’d be in Port Angeles and for that I made motel reservations for 2 nights. The rest of the trip would be spent with family. Once I had my itinerary nailed down to that level I was pretty relaxed and excited to start, other than making the trip sans Elmer.

Almost an entire week at the beginning of the trip would allow me to shoot some photographs along the Oregon and Washington coast. That also caused me to be concerned with preparations for the camera gear. But it wasn’t until the week before leaving that I realized I needed to do a few things related to my photography equipment.

First, I’ve gone out on weekends and shot perhaps 500 exposures in one day. This gave me anxiety over storage for images. I have a few SD cards for the two cameras (Nikon D610 and Nikon D3200) but if I ended up shooting a lot I would exceed my SD card capacity. I decided to get a 1T Seagate USB hard drive. I have a RAVPower RP-WD01 SD Card Reader, WiFi hub, and USB port which allows me to transfer data from an SD card to a USB device. I ordered the drive from Amazon and tried out my plan and had that problem solved.

Note that the RAVPower device is about the same size as the USB drive. I can use software on either my Kindle or iPhone 5 to manage the data transfer.

I really wanted to do this instead of buying additional SD cards because I really don’t want to manage a lot of SD cards. By offloading to the USB drive I can store a terabyte of data. And, with the price of USB drives, it ends up being cheaper as well. Plus, although I didn’t do it for this trip, you could take 2 USB drives and copy the files from the SD card to both drives (one at a time) and have a backup copy.

This plan allows me to use enough SD card space for a single day and then offload them to the USB drive(s). Not long before my trip I purchased a 16G SanDisk ExtremePro card with a 95MB per second write speed to use for burst shots. I like it, and think I’ll get another one. Thom Hogan recommends staying at the 32G or lower cards because the cameras seem to read and write slower with the bigger cards. I’ve experienced the same thing so I got this very fast card in only the 16G size and it works amazing.

My main cards before this have been Lexar 600x 32G cards which have a 45MB per second write speed. I use 2 of them in the Nikon D610 camera and they are very stable, giving me over 500 shots per card. I use a single SanDisk Ultra 16G card with a maximum 30MB per second write speed in the Nikon D3200 and I get about 250 shots on that card. I have some additional cards as well but I think I’ll switch over to the 16G SanDisk ExtremePro 95MB speed cards for my main cards, meaning I need to purchase 2 more of them.

One other purchase I made before my trip was a UV filter for my wide angle lens. I read from many sources that it’s a good idea to use one for protection when you’re at the coast to protect the lens from blowing sand and salt water spray. I have not been one to use a ultra-violet (UV) filter for protection purposes in the past. I fall more in the Thom Hogan (and others ) camp that feels it’s not really necessary and it adds another piece of glass in the light transmission path that can reduce image quality (IQ). Most people in this camp feel that a lens hood does more to protect a lens and DSLR cameras are not susceptible to UV light anyway (unlike film cameras of the past).

However, one place everyone seems to agree that a UV lens is worth it is at the beach. So I picked up a B+W 77mm UV MRC lens for the Nikkor 16-35mm f/4 lens. It’s a $1,260 or so lens and using a $55 UV filter to avoid ruining it seemed financially sound even if I never use it afterwards. I already had a B+W 52mm UV MRC for the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens and I had a cheap 67mm UV filter for the Nikkor 70-200mm f/4 lens which I just planned to use only when necessary.

One other note I’ll make about camera gear is that I did try to take a few pictures during the trip with the 70-200mm lens that I really wanted longer exposures for and didn’t have enough neutral density filtering available. It sucks when you’re somewhere and you want to take a shot that you may never get to again and you don’t have the filter you need. In my case it was before the sun went all the way down, and I wanted to blur the wave action on a beach. I couldn’t do it without blowing out the picture. After not being to the coast in at least 14 years and then not being able to take the shot I wanted when I was there was disappointing to say the least.

That was all the “real” photo gear I added prior to my trip. However, one thing I also did was add a iPhone 5 to my luggage. I haven’t been using a cell phone since the early 2000’s. My wife wanted the new iPhone 6 Plus so we got that and I took over the iPhone 5, mainly so that I could use it to arrange or find lodging along the trip. What I didn’t expect was the extent I used it for photographs.

By the time I got home from the trip I had racked up 3,849.2 miles, 1,344 pictures on the Nikon cameras, and 1,699 pictures and videos (a dozen or so videos) on the iPhone. I found that most of the pictures during the day were not going to be great no matter what camera I used so I ended up taking more of what I consider “snapshots” with the iPhone than getting out the Nikons. When I wanted to try to get the best image quality, mainly golden hour or night shots, I used the Nikons.

Downtown Portland (iPhone 5)

I also found I used the iPhone to take pictures that I could immediately share on Facebook, letting my classmates and family and other friends see what I was up to. I got a lot of, well, “mention” from classmates about the frequent “where’s Waldo” updates. Most of them had fun with it, I think, and I know I did. Thanks again, Facebook.





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