Photo Tip: Amsterdam

You can’t go to Amsterdam and not visit this iconic city symbol. It’s located in the Museumplein city square in front of the Rijksmuseum. At any given time there will be tons of people in your shot, which adds character to the photo if that’s your sort of thing.

However, if you want a less cluttered shot, here’s a tip- walk to the back side, snap your photo, and then “flip” your image. Example:

One: take your photo.

Two: with a program of your choosing, use the flip option to flip your picture. If you have a smartphone or iPad, a variety of apps will do this including Diptic, Pic Jointer, Pic Stitch, etc. Usually it is a symbol that looks like a mirror image of 2 triangles or rectangles with a line in between. I am using the Pic Stitch app in the example below. If you’re on your desktop, there a few options: Picasa (Control-Shift-H), Preview for Mac go to Tools -> Flip Horizontal, or you can even do it within WordPress and of course Photoshop.

Three: Save to your camera roll, add filters, post process, etc, and you’re all done!

Hope this little tip helps! Someone with a sharp eye will certainly do a double-take, but as a non-purist I really don’t mind!

Akihabara Electronics

This district of Akiharbara is known for electronics. If you can think of it, they probably sell it. We spent a few hours in the largest store in the district- Yodobashi Camera- and it wasn’t enough. But lucky us, there is one in Kyoto, so we’ll be exploring that one as well.

For anyone who was been to the mecca of camera stores in the USA, B&H photo, Yodobashi puts that place to shame. The store is just a completely massive place that sells every single piece of camera equipment and more! Try walking through all the tv/audio, computer, high end watches, washing machines and refrigerators, games, stationary, beauty products, bicycles, and more! This place has it all. There’s even 2 floors with restaurants and a food court.

Unfortunately due to the poor exchange rate prices are relatively expensive. So Jeannie won’t be getting that new fridge after all. Bummer.

An Open Letter

Dear well intentioned tourist who we’ve asked to take a picture of us,

This is not how you do it.

Sincerely,

JJ

It’s rare that the two of us have good pictures together. I don’t think it’s due to fact that our camera is unwieldy or hard to use (ppl with SLRs have taken bad photos of us as well). I feel that it’s because many people lack the simple skill of properly framing a photo, or they simply don’t care how your photo turns out. For example, at the Christ the Redeemer statue, it would help if the actual statue was in the photo as well.

Even if:

-the weapon of choice is film, P&S, SLR, or nowadays, the camera phone
-the camera is in P or M mode
-flash is used or not used indoors or outdoors (Okay, so I cringe a little here, but can you blame me?? Those cheesy flash filled sunset pictures are so terrible!)
-filters are outfitted or not on lenses

We all fit in some combo of the above. If someone has the most expensive camera and shoots exclusively in M, you would think they could frame properly as well. We don’t ask for or expect professional quality photos from the general passerby. For once I’d just like a properly framed photo where limbs aren’t cut off and where the attraction is in in the picture. Oh well. Until that happens, we’ll just keep asking everybody until there are no more people or we just give up and use the timer. Lugging around a tripod around the world isn’t really an option for us. Luckily in this case, we got a decent picture 3 tries later!

Anyone share in my frustration?

Tech Logistics

During the planning process, a question that came up was how we were going to manage our photos/videos and stay connected on our trip.  The idea of lugging around a computer didn’t really appeal to us, however, there’s a lot of compatibility issues to work out when NOT carrying a computer.  So we decided upon the iPad to become our blogging and media processing tool of choice.  Plus an iPad is so, so, so much lighter than our Macbricks…ahem books.  I’m still trying to get used to the idea that you can’t just “plug” in the camera to an iPad and “dump” the “files” onto a “desktop.”  No siree, we had to pick up these little suckers.  I guess it means less cords to lug around, but Apple, really?  You couldn’t have stuck a USB slot there?

Currently, our travel tech equipment consists of a Nikon D7000 (along with a 17-55/2.8 and a 35/1.8), a Panasonic TS2 waterproof camera, the iPhone 4S and the aforementioned iPad. We were finally to sell our D300 (faithful to it for nearly 4 years, even celebrity marriages don’t last that long!) and switched to the D7000 for its lighter weight (notice a trend we’re going for?) and dual SD cards, and we switched to the iPhone 4s for its world compatibility (it was pretty easy-peasy getting Verizon to unlock our phones).  I gotta admit, I was anti-iPhone for the longest time because I am an avid user of Google products and as we all know Apple + Google ≠ BFF.  However, I have quite warmed up to it and have found unofficial apps to access my beloved Google products.  Anyone got any additional app suggestions?

So the Cliff Notes version of this post is, we don’t really have an excuse to not blog or share pictures of our adventures.