476 Sixth Annual Lessons Learned From The Latest Photo Safari

In the Sun Yat Sen Garden

Here we are again with a listing of what worked and what didn’t work during this year’s photo safari. I barely came up with that tenth thing I learned from this year’s safari right before posting this. Maybe I’m not paying enough attention, maybe I was just having a good time. I guarantee it is not because I know it all.

Here’s what I learned on this photo safari.

1. Camera bag selection is an iterative process. My latest try, the Lowepro slingshot AWC 300 is not cutting it. It's just too big and as a result when I swing the bag around to my front, the bag sits too high and I can’t get to the lenses easily. It’s great for carrying lots of stuff around, but I pretty much have to take the whole thing off to change a lens. I may have to go back to the slingshot AWC 100 and figure out how to carry anything else I want when I am out on Safari.
2. The Panasonic Lumix G85 is simply a wonderful camera. There is nothing else to say. Well, OK, I will say a few things. It’s easy to use and the set-up and operation is consistent with my previous camera, the Panasonic GH2. I’ll know more when I make some prints, but I am very enthusiastic about this camera.
3. Brooks brought along his new 12-60mm Panasonic Lens. He raves about that lens. I didn’t even want to “try it out” because it would make me want to buy one for myself.
4. Thinking out of the box can be humorous. I wanted to borrow Brooks’ 45-200 lens that was mounted on his camera. Rather than going through the whole moving lenses back and forth, I switched memory cards. Our file sequence numbers are out of whack for a few frames, but that was a quick and clever way to solve that problem.
5. PBWA (Photography By Wandering Around) is a high risk improbable reward situation. Spending a lot of time driving to hope you can luck into a good photo is not a real good use of time. After years of Destination Location Photography we realized how many opportunities we had wasted both this week and over the years by just driving around looking for subjects to photograph.
6. We should have done better research on what we wanted to photograph and made sure that we went to those locations. Would have saved us some time and gasoline. We would have made more photographs, but had less time to talk about photography.
7. Landscape photography is a crapshoot if you are a tourist. We went to Hoh Rainforest this week and we were treated to sunny, cloudless days where the temperature was 70F. I would think that the weather was not always quite this wonderful on the Olympic Peninsula. So, my experience in the Rainforest is probably not typical.
8. The folks at Adobe continue to amaze me with the way they can move around 0s and 1s. This LightRoom mobile and LightRoom on the web make working in the field very easy. I will have to head to the Apple Genius Bar to see if I can get by with my camera and an iPad Mini. That would be wonderful because the less I have to lug around the happier I am.
9. As cool as LightRoom mobile is, the weak link will always be where you are located. A good photo safari location has no cell phone service. Small motels near good photo safari locations have wi-fi so weak you can barely do email. Uploading hundreds of 16meg image files is just not going to happen. It’s always something.
10. Oh, great. The week after I get back home Apple has a new iOS that is supposed to be the answer to all our prayers, especially file management. I’ll wait a few weeks until all those bugs are discovered and squashed and then we’ll see if there is an improvement in what the little guy can do.