Just got back from Costa del Sol at our Marriott resort. A good vacation with 2 weeks spent doing little more than sitting on the beach, meandering to a chiringuito for a drink or a snack, and "difficult"
decisions about where to eat each night.
It was a
Gilligan's Island vacation where we do not rent a car ( rental rates were very expensive given the scant driving we would have done ) so I played the role of the Professor and my wife was Mary Ann ( I'm not plunky like the Skipper and definitely not a Gilligan sort of guy
). Had the camera in tow all the time, but I take very few resort photos and concentrate on portrait work with my wife.
This trip was also a more "sober" trip ( but by no means a "tea-tottler" trip either ). We only do 5 bottles of wine in 14 nights ( the record was 12 bottles over 15 nights a couple of years ago ). The problem with bottles of wine is that "Mary Ann" is like a canary in the mine and requires only a glass to get tipsy & I end up downing 2/3 of the bottle. So it's more for the sake of extra calories than sobriety that I ratchet down this trip. Then again, with our glases of sherry before our meals and the after-dinner limoncello always offered us by the folks at our fav Italian restaurant, I'm not so sure about the saved calories.
This is shot @ 8PM and you can see the sun is still rather high in the sky. But this was that
magic hour of light when things are aglow and colors are vibrant. The sun still has 90 minutes before it disappears and I do a whole bunch of shots here of my wife who actually cooperates this day without getting mad at my multiple snaps. Not using a flash here, so I'm a little underexposed in the shadows. I fix some of this going +EV by 2/3 in aperture mode, metering on her face to get the skin tones reasonably correct. Shooting something like f/5.0 with some zoom. It's not a perfect shot, but close enough to get details in the underside of the umbrella and to pull out warm BG colors. I'm loving this Canon G12 and what it can do. You folks with DSLRs can capture light even better for shots like this. I add the vignetting and do ordinary sharpening in Photoshop, otherwise this is the camera at work.
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This is two images merged together post-processing in Photoshop CS2 ( yeah, I'm working with an old version with less features ). I shoot these hand-held in ordinary aperature mode. I exposure lock the first shot so that my second image is exposed the same. My camera can display grid lines, so I lock my elbows and wait for live view to return before moving over 1/3 frame for the second shot. My camera has a pano setting, but I've gotten used to this technique as I can bring the images into Photoshop and merge them.
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Shot at night inside of a restaurant astride the Marriott Playa Andaluza resort -- if any of you guys visit here, be sure to stop by the
Vela Azul for lunch or dinner. I shoot ISO 1600 without flash and I convert this to B&W post processing. I like working in ambient light as it does not annoy people & allows you to capture moments. Of course I'm sacrificing resolution/detail with the high ISO. The moon is actually shining outside the window. The man is the owner, Jean Paul. A Frenchman who speaks very little English ( a lot of ponting at the menu when non-French speaker order -- I myself use my halting Spanish to converse with him ). But he's a gracious host living his dream to own a restaurant. I keep a
photo gallery of his restaurant here.
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Here's another shot which shows the restaurant and the moon out the window. As you can see, the lighting here is mixed flourescent/halogen & I've got lots of color cast going on here. But the previous photo shows how B&W can mask these defects and create more drama and presence. This was one of those nights we opt for a bottle, in this instance a botella de cava. Mary Ann is tipsy from the bubbly cava, but we have only a couple hundred feet to get back to the resort. This is an OK photo, but it's more about showing the ambiance of the place and the evening . . . well actually how the entire Spain vacation goes.
Hope you folks enjoy the photos. The new Playa photos are found in
this gallery. I'm just starting to work on "Mary Ann's" portrait shots as I continue to fiddle around and figure out how to get better portrait shots. If I have any other nice shots, I'll post them here. Ultimately I'll need a strobe and an umbrella to get the flash off of the camera and do some more advanced work. Not sure when that will happen as this mean more $$ and more stuff to lug around.
Travel safe & keep grabbing pixels.
Barry aka
Gilligan/Professor
