A New Kind of Travel
An interesting thing happened to me recently. I needed to take a bit of time off work else I would lose the time so I decided to take off the week of Memorial Day. I have been collecting frequent flyer miles for some time and thought to myself, why don’t go somewhere and photograph. JUST me and my camera. While I enjoy going places with my wife (and #1 best camera assistant), it was interesting to meander and linger where the photos took me. Pamela is exceptionally patient when I “artist-out” and lose myself in photographing. I can sometimes spend hours taking photos of the same darn place, but I am also conscious of her and want her vacation time to be fun as well. This trip was different, not better mind you, but different. It was more work than anything, but never felt a bit unlike passion.
Bad Shoes! BAD!
I have been to Washington D.C. three times now so I know a few things about the layout of the National Mall. For one, much of the trails are made up of tiny gravel and dirt. It gets on your shoes and I decided it would be better to wear an old pair of tennis shoes so as not to get one of my good pairs filthy. Little did I remember just how massive the National Mall really is and after the first day my feet were really sore from all the walking. By the second day I had developed five sizable blisters on my feet (mostly the left) and could barely walk. Pro-Tip…always wear good, comfortable, supportive shoes when going to a big city that requires more walking they you are used to.
Technicals
This is a 9 exposure bracket (-4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4) taken on a Canon 5D Mark II (Magic Lantern Loaded) with a 16-35mm f2.8 II lens at 35mm, mounted on a Really Right Stuff tripod and ball-head. The brackets were combined in Photomatix, exported to Photoshop, cleaned up, tonal contrast and sharpening applied with Nik Software. Finish work was done in Adobe Lightroom 4 (contrast, color, crop, clarity, etc). This photo is from the back side of the Lincoln Memorial about an two hours before sunset.
