San Clemente Car Show

Today was the 12th Annual San Clemente (CA) Car Show. As I typically do when shooting for fun, I went with my "One Day/One Lens" philosophy and used the 70mm "pancake" to photograph all the cars. I couldn't have gone with a wider angle lens to capture the entire car, as the event was crowded, and I didn't want to include heads and bodies of strangers in my photos. The 70mm FOV also gave me a bit of a challenge in that I had to focus only on car details or patterns that looked interesting. All photos shot in RAW with the K10D; processed with PhotoLab 3.1 into TIFF's; and converted them into small (< 1MB) JPEGs for web viewing.

21mm photos from Tokyo

I had just an hour Saturday morning on my last day in Tokyo to relax and take some photos. The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Space is two streets from my hotel in Ikebukuro. Here are a few shots using the 21mm "pancake" lens and K10D from this brief walk-around .

DA* 50-135mm Family Portraits

Here are some more test shots using the DA* 50-135mm lens with the K10D. All photos were shot in RAW mode at ISO 200 at f/5.6. Other than converting to JPEG with PhotoLab (SilkyPix), no post-processing was applied to any of the images.

Cabo Surf Hotel

Since taking photos has always been such an integral part of my vacations, I thought I'd share a few snapshots of the great little hotel we're staying at in Mexico. The Cabo Surf Hotel is located on Playa Acapulquito (Costa Azul) just outside of San Jose del Cabo. It's a small hotel with about 24 rooms that is located right on one of the areas best surfing breaks.

The hotel has great food with a dining room that's perched right over the beach and offers spectacular views of the Sea of Cortez. You can see the city of San Jose del Cabo to your left and the very exclusive resort, Palmila, to your right. Except for kids of all ages that are taking surfing lessons, the 300 yard long beach is protected at both ends by cliffs, which are only passable at low tide. The ambience here is extremely relaxed and the hotel staff is very friendly and accomodating. The hotel has become very popular for small, destination wedding parties, and I've included two photos at the end of this post so you get a sense of how these weddings look. All photos, except the two wedding shots, taken with the K10D and the 21mm "pancake" lens. Exposure in AV mode with EV compensation as needed.

This is our third time staying at Cabo Surf Hotel, and I can highly recommend it to anyone wanting a small, private and relaxing vacation if you're planing to a trip to Cabo San Lucas.