One of the great things about the internet is how easy it is to share our lives and experiences with others, whether through blog form like this, social media, or videos on YouTube (or Vimeo, or others). I’ve been watching a lot of these over the past few months and have even become a patron on Patreon for several as well. I’ll list the best ones I’ve found here for you to check out and enjoy.
Asides
What’s On Deck
I’ll resume more regular posting in the next month or so, but in the meantime:
- I’m working on finding a new job, since my current contract is about to hit its max of 18 months
- I’ve started diving into improving my incredibly poor grasp of Spanish using the excellent Duolingo, as it will become useful as I continue my travels around the (mostly tropical) Americas and Caribbean
- I have my first trip dedicated to birding lined up: in the third week of September I’ll be spending four days at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge
- Nikon is releasing their new 200-500mm f/5.6 lens in the middle of September and I’m very tempted to buy it. I’ve liked the Tamron 150-600mm but I’m not entirely satisfied with its sharpness at f/8, and the bokeh at f/9 and above is very harsh
- My next sailing course, ASA 106, is happening the first weekend of October, where I’ll be learning advanced techniques in coastal sailing including anchoring and sailing at night
- And of course the San Juans charter trip I’ve detailed previously will be occurring over Labor Day weekend, and marking the second time I’ll be a skipper during a sailing charter, and the first time I’ve put the entire thing together by myself
New camera body, unpredictable weather, and waiting on Adobe
No gallery post from this last weekend: the weather report was opposite of what was predicted, so my booked-up Saturday turned out to be beautiful and the predicted-partly-sunny-Sunday turned out to be gray and rainy the entire day. That said, I had time to play indoors (with my parrots as subjects) with the new Nikon D7200 that was released (and which I bought from Glazer’s Camera) on Thursday the 19th.
It’s a huge upgrade from my D3200, particularly in terms of high ISO and autofocus, as well as configurability, so I’m still learning my way around it. Unfortunately, it’s also so new that Adobe doesn’t yet support the RAW files with their Adobe Camera RAW support. This means that I’m stuck using Nikon’s awful Capture NX-D software to edit the RAW files until Adobe releases an update to handle the D7200, so I’m avoiding doing much editing for now, instead just culling things not worth editing and doing what I can with a few of my favorite shots. Once Adobe does another release, I’ll be going over several weeks (hopefully not months!) of shots and I’ll post my favorites here.
Instead, here’s one from this weekend that I really liked, and you can see a few others over on my Instagram account.
Auri
I talk to strangers
Today was a unexpectedly nice day in Seattle. Rather than the deluge of rain predicted, it was party sunny skies all morning.
So, of course, I went out and took pictures. I won’t repost most of them here, but I had two nice conversations with different people today, both of whom pointed me toward things I might not have otherwise noticed.
I want this to be me
You can find some pretty inspiring or intriguing stuff just looking around at satellite views on Google Maps. Like this cruising catamaran, anchored on the southern end of an incredibly remote atoll in the Indian Ocean. (it’s called Egmont Atoll, and you can find it–and that catamaran–right here: 6°40’54.0″S 71°23’02.9″E). As best I can tell based on the scale of the satellite image the catamaran is somewhere between 30-50′ long, which puts it into the category of catamarans I have experience sailing on, and the kind I want to someday own.
I found this a few months ago, and my first thought was what inspired the title of this post: “I want that to be me.” I want that to be my boat, out in the middle of nowhere, nobody but me and my crew for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles in any direction.
Someday it will be.