Catalina Island and Ocean Kayaking

June 3, 2012

On our latest foray into the wild outdoors, we found one of those niches where film cameras still thrive; underwater. While underwater digital cameras have exploded onto the market, most people still use film for this purpose because the camera can be disposable and requires only a small investment instead of a large one. We also choose film for our Ocean Kayaking and underwater portions of our trip while we kept the Canon T2i double bagged in dry bags.

This weekend Jamie and I went to Santa Catalina Island on the Catalina Flyer out of Newport/Balboa. It was a packed boat and we were near the front of the line so I claimed a couple seats near the front on the second deck. Note to self, do not make that mistake again. The whole front of the ship seems to cantilever with the fulcrum being near the back. Therefore the front of the boat bobs up and down the most. To make matters worse, the front windows are useless unless standing so needless to say this is where most people start at who end up with motion sickness. I actually survived pretty well and didn’t have to move but Jamie had to take a trip to the open part of the deck for fresh air.

Once we arrived, we had our first activity planned out pretty well. We huffed it to the other side of Avalon Bay and into Descanso Bay where we rented the “Not so early Bird Special” of a two person Kayak, wet suits, snorkel gear and flippers, a soft cooler, and a large dry bag. We quickly donned our wetsuits and headed out into the water but not before double bagging the T2i and my cell phones and single bagging the rest of our clothes and stuff. We went east and slowly warmed up to the work of paddling in the open water.

We went around a couple of points on the island and found a nice little cove which is only accessible via the water. I pulled the kayak up out of the water and sat down to eat some lunch. Kayaking is tiring work and I was super hungry and so was Jamie. Then after a short wait we put on our flippers and snorkels and headed into the cold sea. The boulders made the first couple of feet pretty difficult and we both fell over multiple times. Eventually I got in far enough to float and swam out a little. Our cove had a pretty dense kelp forest right next to it. This threw Jamie off for a moment until I mentioned that you can just float over it.

So we went out into the water until we reached the edge of the kelp. This ended up being the perfect place to be since this is where all the fish hang out. We saw schools of tiny fish I haven’t identified and we saw a lot of the Garibaldi fish. These fish whose scientific name is Hypsypops rubicundus are also the official state fish of California. They are bright orange and quite easy to spot. Once we got the hang of snorkeling, we tracked several groups of these fish who like to dart in and out of hiding.

Content with our snorkeling fun, we packed back up and set out in the Kayak again. We had plenty of time left in our four hour rental so we went further around the island. We spotted a couple more fish in the clear waters and snapped some more photos from within the Kayak. When we turned around we also saw a Seal although it vanished under water as soon as we spotted it.

It turns out that on the way back, Jamie had enough of this paddling thing and let me provide all the energy to move the kayak while she took in the scenery. I at least settled into a nice rhythm and was able to get us back easily enough. We got back almost an hour early which was fine since we did what we wanted.

Since Ocean Kayaking sapped so much energy from the both of us, we decided that we should eat again. Descanso Beach has a bar and grill right on the waterfront. We ate there and then made our way back to the center of town. On the way back what did we do? We ate some more. This time coffee Gelato and chocolate cheesecake. Finally it was time to go and we got back in line for the Flyer. This time, we sat on the back and enjoyed the panorama of the island as it grew ever smaller and eventually disappeared from view.

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Diva Dash San Diego 1-21-2012

January 10, 2012

Shez Photography took the photographs for the SHAPE Diva Dash on the morning of Janurary 21, 2012. If you have arrived at this page looking for your photos then you are in the right place. As soon as the photos are posted you will find the link to the gallery here in this post.

(Update 22JAN2012) Thanks to everybody who braved the rain and showed up to race. We have thousands of great shots and will be posting them shortly.

(Update24JAN2012) The majority of the photos have been posted. Check out the GALLERY to see your race photos and keep coming back to see more as we continue to upload.

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Pasadena Marathon Bike Tour 2011

May 22, 2011

As the first of the three alarms I set for myself the night before started beeping, I immediately knew I was going to need coffee and a lot of it. It was 5AM and I was standing in a dark hotel room trying to force my eyes to open. Why do they have to have these events so early in the morning? As I readied myself by dressing and downing a full cup of coffee, Jamie asked if I was going to wear a jacket. “Probably not” was my reply as I looked out the front door just in case. “Ok, yes” was my new answer as I saw it was softly raining. My hotel room was two and a half blocks from the start but I still needed about 5 minutes between getting my bike out of the car and riding down there. I finally get my biking shoes on and head to the car. I had patched the inner tubes on both tires the day before and when I left the bike the night before, both were holding pressure. Both were flat now though. I quickly put 100 PSI in both and hoped for the best. I clipped in and rode down the slick roads to the road block and proceeded to join the group just as the ride began.

If you have ever been in a bike tour, you will know that these things start more with a whimper then with a roar. In other words, more often then not you end up walking your bike across the start because of the traffic and lack of width at the starting line. This day was no exception and it was fine because by the starting line, my front tire had gone from 100 PSI to 1 PSI. I rode anyways carefully around the first corner and to the first clearing of grass on the side of the road. I then proceeded to change my flat inner tube. This let every last person in the pack pass me while I worked to change the tube as quickly as possible. Fortunately the rear held pressure because I only had one tube.

I know I should carry CO2 but I don’t so I could only put about 40 PSI in the front tire. This I did and then I was off. The course was flat with a few slight inclines and then a pretty quick decline to a narrow right hand more than ninety degree turn. I was actually glad I was still back in the thin crowd at this point of the ride. Some more incline and I took a small break. By this time I had passed some riders on the uphills but I wanted to make sure my body had plenty of fuel so I stopped to eat some Honey Stinger Energy Chews. This was one of the best ideas of my life because this fueled me for a long time.

Next the course headed toward the Rose Bowl where it had a large out and back section. This is also where the half marathon runners would split from the full length course. Now bike riders like to ride on the right side of the road for some reason even if the cones tell them otherwise. This led to some confusion but nothing major. Besides the course confusion, this is also where I happened to be when the skies opened up and a torrent of water fell on top of me and the other riders. It had been raining up to this point already but now it was a downpour and to make matters worse, bikes kick up a lot of spray straight up the riders backside. To make matters even worse, my glasses started fogging.

All of these things happened, but I rode on. At least my inner tubes didn’t give me any more headaches. I was up with the main pack by now and passing a good amount of riders on both the uphills and downhills. The second half of the course had some nice big dips in it but it also has some of the straightest and widest streets. This allowed me to pass a lot of people. Some people I passed multiple times because they started cutting the course. I don’t know why you would do that but that is their choice. I chose to ride the whole length and put up with the torrential downpour. Another thing that happened to me is I had to belch a lot. This brought up the smell of the beer I had consumed the day before from Lucky Baldwins. This is the Pub within walking distance of the hotel we stayed in.

The rain slackened slightly before I finally rolled across the finish. Jamie was there to take my photo and I got my finishers medal. Jamie took a few more shots while I was wet and covered in road grime. I proceeded to head back to my room and take a nice hot shower before driving home. It was a fun ride but next year hopefully it does not rain and my tires stay inflated.

Blackthorn's Dry Apple Cider and Fuller's London Pride

Lucky Baldwins assortment of beers

Kasteel

Even with Live View mode on the waiter couldn't get a good photo

Marathon Start

Crossing the finish

Soaking wet

Bike Tour Complete

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Top Ten Reasons To Avoid the Nikon Coolpix P500 – Bryan’s Review

April 25, 2011

To see more test shots from the Nikon P500 check out the GALLERY.

Occasionally a company known for quality of build as well as design will unveil a product that is so ill conceived and even more poorly implemented that it casts a shadow on the entire reputation of the company. For Nikon, that product is the Coolpix P500. What follows is born from my time owning this contraption and experiencing first hand just how wrong a product can get.

1)The Nikon Coolpix P500 tries to do everything but does not do anything well. This camera is packed with more features then I care to list. The manual is electronic only, most likely because if they printed it, it wouldn’t fit in the box. The features all sound nice but in reality are almost universally so poorly implemented to be useless.

Photo is unedited. F6.3 at 1/30 of a second. ISO 200

2) The camera is based around a sensor usually found on much cheaper cameras. This is major because without a solid sensor, everything else falls apart. At an MSRP of $399, the fact that this camera has a 12 megapixel sensor is puzzling. However megapixels are not what this sensors lacks the most. My old Canon SD550 has only 7.1 megapixels and takes better photos. The problem is the sensor only really works at ISO 100. Anything above that introduces strong noise reduction and above 400 the noise reduction is so strong that people will look at your photo and ask why you did not try to focus it.

Photo is unedited. F5 at 1/80 of a second. ISO 200

3) Manual focus feature is welcome but so poorly implemented that it is useless. Remember, this camera is a superzoom with an electronic viewfinder and an LCD screen as your only two options for focusing with. The EV is so small and low resolution that it might as well not exist. When using the LCD, manual focus brings up a zoom of the center of the frame so you can more easily focus. The problem is even with this zoom, pulling focus is an exercise in frustration. I was glad the feature was there but wish it was implemented in a useful way.

Photo is unedited. F6.3 at 1/100 of a second. ISO 200

4) Aperture Priority mode ignores your aperture settings if you zoom out. This is major once again and became a deal breaker. I am sure Nikon can fix this with a firmware update but I have a feeling they have no intention to based on the response from their customer service saying there is nothing wrong. Basically it works like this. The lens is not a fixed aperture lens. This means that when zoomed in, it cannot retain the most wide open F-stop. That’s fine. However if you zoom in and set the f-stop to 8.0 and then zoom back out, the camera opens up the aperture to f-stop 3.5. It does not need to do this and it is counter-intuitive when shooting in aperture priority.

Photo is unedited. F4 at 1/640 of a second. ISO 200

5) The superzoom lens has too much distortion and distorts in a non-common way. I’m used to barrel and pincushion distortion on superzoom lenses. The distortion from this lens defies classification. Its not that it just has barrel distortion at full wide; it also has stretching and pulling and other oddly shaped distortion that I’ve never seen before. In addition, the lens is just not very sharp. An unsharp lens combined with a poor sensor is a recipe for disaster.

Photo is unedited. F3.7 at 1/1500 of a second. ISO 200

6) The auto-focus is slow and dumb. If you set the auto-focus to center point, it is slightly faster. However your only two options are the whole frame or center point. Neither works all that well but the whole frame auto-focus is a disaster. It will routinely choose 5-6 points to focus on; none of which are what is actually the subject of the photo.

Photo is unedited. F3.4 at 1/200 of a second. ISO 200

7) Battery life is poor and the camera does not come with a charger in the box. Enough said.

Photo is unedited. F4.2 at 1/1250 of a second. ISO 200

8 ) When you turn on the camera with the lens cap on, it tries to move the lens into the ready position even though it is obstructed. This is a very annoying design feature. The lens should not even need to protrude to work at full wide. Nikon could have extended the shroud or designed the cap differently. Instead they left this design flaw fully intact. It is the little things like this that make me wonder if Nikon even cares if this camera is good or not.

Photo is unedited. F5 at 1/100 of a second. ISO 200

9) Auto White Balance varies wildly between shots of the same scene. This combined with the fact that this camera only takes jpeg files makes for a very annoying time doing post production.

Photo is unedited. F4.2 at 1/320 of a second. ISO 200

10) The images this camera takes just look weird. I cannot place my finger on it but even in a bright sunny day photograph, the images just look flat and lacking. By flat, I don’t mean low contrast. I instead mean that they lack dimensionality. I have a feeling that this camera has a lower dynamic range than most and so captures images accordingly and then compensates with in camera processing to make the image look “normal”. This is just a theory but it is the only thing I can think of to explain the weirdness of the images.

Photo is unedited. F3.4 at 1/1250 of a second. ISO 200

In conclusion, stay away from the Nikon Coolpix P500 like a medieval peasant would avoid the plague. I know for a fact that Nikon is more than capable of making fine cameras that produce wonderful photos. This is not one of those cameras. I would go so far as to say that this camera is single-handedly destroying Nikon’s reputation around the world and they would be best served by taking it off the market.

Jamie and I dumped this contraption and picked up the Canon T2i instead. This is mostly because we already have a collection of fine Canon lenses. We both love the camera and coincidentally the camera fits in the same case we picked up for the P500. If you can afford the price difference, get that camera instead because you will not regret it.

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Cars and Coffee Irvine

March 13, 2011

Hello friends and Facebook fans. Jamie and I are finally posting more photo goodness. We purchased another camera which still has not arrived yet and I will be reviewing it once we have it in our hands. We also have events coming in the next month so look for more frequent updates.

Yesterday Jamie and I somehow dragged ourselves out of bed at a much too early hour for a Saturday and went to the weekly Cars and Coffee™ Irvine event. This gathering is a spectacle of car performance and history that anybody who loves cars will enjoy. The best part of this weekly gathering is that it is free to attend (you don’t even pay for parking) and the only thing being sold is coffee.

On any given Saturday, you will find at least five decades of automobile history covered in addition to seeing multiple supercars and at least a few race cars. Yesterday also got a special visit by the new McLaren MP4-12C. When we arrived, there was a crowd around this car and when we left, there was still a crowd around this car. Another car that carries the supercar status is the Saleen S7. Yes, an example of one of these cars was present as well. My favorite car out of those present would have to be the Lotus Evora because it is a Lotus with back seats.

Along with the production supercars and historical automobiles were of course professionally modified cars as well. Hennessey had about four or five vehicles present including a Camaro and a Ford GT.

Jamie took a lot of photos and you can find full resolution versions of all the photos shown here and more at the GALLERY.

Ford GT40

Saleen S7 Twin Turbo

Lotus Evora

Lotus Exige

Chevy Bel Air

Morgan AeroMax

McLaren MP4-12C

Lotus Evora

Ferrari and Nissan GTR

Lamborghini Countach

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Miramar Air Show 2010

November 25, 2010

Thunder storms off the coast subside to reveal the quiet entrance of thousands of cars. The hustle of packing everything and moving it over the trek to the destination. Kids, chairs, umbrellas, LOTS of cameras. The silence of the morning is contrasted with the obvious drive in everybody to get where they are going. The sun breaks the sky and the Air Show Starts!

The show starts with R/C planes flying off in the distance. There are highly maneuverable and from some of the photos can be confused with the real thing. Our vantage point only allows us glimpses of these planes so we wait and apply sun screen in preparation for the long day. Soon the wait is rewarded with the morning performance of Sean Tucker in the Oracle Challenger III. During this performance Sean will perform tricks that no other performer can replicate. He also pulls the most negative-g maneuvers I have seen. Sean can put the plane in a hover, fly it backwards, do a myriad of other things that boggle the mind. The air show is worth it just to see him perform.

The next aircraft to perform was a stand in since one of the AT-6 planes had mechanical problems. So instead the audience got to see the slowest plane at the air show, an Antonov An-2 biplane. This plane is massive for a single engine aircraft and yet it can take off from distance as short as 170 meters (558 feet). The design is old but it continues to be produced in some countries even today because it is reliable and safe.

The very next powered craft to fly was John Collver in his “Wardog” AT-6 “Texan”. The AT-6 was used as a trainer and so John flies in the smooth and simple maneuvers that pilots would have learned back when this airplane was used. The AT-6 is massive and powerful for a single engine trainer.

The show turns a page and the military exhibitions begin with the afternoon portion of the show. In quick succession the U.S. Army Golden Knights Parachute Team take flight along with a whole slew of military aircraft from Cobras to Osprey to Falcons and Hornets. These all fly off and the Golden Knights parachute out while the National Anthem plays. The last jumper has the American Flag flying off of the back of his parachute. Immediately after he lands, the most exciting part of the air show gets under way; MAGTF!

The Marine Air Ground Task Force demonstration shows in quick succession a coordinated air and land effort to take an important strategical asset. AV-8B Harriers do mock strafing runs while F/A 18 F Super Hornets go on mock bombing runs. UH-1 Huey helicopters bring in ground troops to fast rope in and secure the landing zone. MV-22 Osprey fly in using airplane mode for quick arrival and then transition to helicopter mode to drop off their troops. AH-1Z Cobras secure the area for the ground troops while CH-53E Super Stallions air drop light vehicles in the distance. Soon after the armored vehicles arrive including armored personnel carriers and M1A2 Main Battle Tanks. The whole time the ground troops seek cover and cover each other’s movements as they advance. The Hornets and Harriers fly by doing a mock mid-air refueling run. Finally the troops reach the stands and the demonstration is over.

The tanks and the troops travel along the flight line to leave and shake the hands of the audience on the way. That concludes MAGTF! Next up the Super Hornet does a legacy flight with an F4U corsair. After that Sean Tucker performs again is his Oracle Challenger III. Then the audience gets to see a Semi-Truck tractor fitted with a jet engine on the back do afterburner runs down the runway. They call this Shockey’s “ShockWave” Jet Truck. Then the same AV-8B Harrier which was in the MAGTF demonstrates vertical landing and take off.

Second only to the MAGTF demonstration in excitement is the demonstration which comes up next. This is of course the F-22 Raptor; the premier air superiority fighter in the world. The F-22 demonstrates its unclassified maneuvers for the audience like low altitude recovery from a complete stall, flying with a negative air speed (flying backwards), power loops, and turns in a radius that outclasses any other fighter at the show. Because the F-22 has thrust vectoring, it can fly with an angle of attack higher then even the Super Hornet and turn tighter as well as achieve Supercruise speeds of breaking the sound barrier without using afterburners.

While the Raptor stayed in the air it was joined by an F-16 and a P-51 Mustang for a legacy flight. This provided excellent photo opportunities to the crowd below as they all had to fly at the speed of the Mustang.

The afternoon show finished out with a demo by the Red Bull Helo which can fly upside down in loops and the Canadian Snow Birds which do just about every formation flying trick that the Blue Angels do. The last performers of the afternoon were of course the Blue Angels who make their flights always appear completely effortless while flying in ridiculously close proximity to each other. All in all it was a good day and worth it if you can ever make it out.