Ocean City, NJ by Deirdre Ryan Photography

Tuesday was a full beach day. Of course I started my day early, got my coffee at Ocean City Coffee Company, my book, camera and sat on the beach to read before it gets crowded.

Now I really enjoyed and loved the Panasonic Lumix 100 LX camera and for this vacation it had everything I needed. A fast lens, large enough sensor, shoots in RAW, etc. However there was a quirk that I had no idea about until much later and I’ll get into this later on.

After spending the day on the beach we ate dinner at Ocean Cafe, and this time with the entire family. While waiting for our food, we heard the Mummers on the boardwalk stop right outside the restaurant. It was really cool!

Found this original Pacman and Ms. Pacman machines… We let her play a few more games including the Batman pinball game, and by then we were exhausted and wanted to get back to our rooms. We had spent the day bodyboarding on the waves, looking for shells, and walking the boards after dinner.

I let my husband take a few pictures.

The next morning I again woke up early to find that after it rained, there were these cloud in the skies that lingered and it looked like the sun was setting, when in fact it was rising. So before getting my coffee, I headed in the opposite direction towards the rising sun to capture these images:

I kept chasing the light and so I found a spot and sat down, putting the camera down on the boards while people were jogging and riding their bikes around me. I shoot in manual mode, so these were almost straight out of the camera with some adjustments.

Then I went onto the beach and continued:

And that’s when I noticed a lone horseshoe crab. The tide was already out, and by the time the beach crowd arrived, I know that someone would try something with it. I man came by and he took off his shirt, placed it around it, and then put the crab in a spot so that it could safely get back into the water. But I first took some shots:

Here’s me taking a selfie with my iPhone SE, no filter in front of the Ocean City Music Pier. I remember when I was a little girl you could set up for the day underneath that pier. Also you could walk underneath the boardwalk, and myself and other kids would throw up sand between the boards at people as the walked above us….but I guess Hurricane Sandy changed all of that.
I started to walk along the beach to go get my coffee and I found another one, but this one was on the move…

I couldn’t get enough of the light that morning, it was just beautiful!

It was super hot and muggy every single day. Even early in the morning, you could feel it. This was the week of that super bad heat have…

Now back to the one quirk that I found really annoying about that camera:
Even though I had the image settings set to RAW, I found out that for some reason the camera was defaulting to jpeg every time I turned it off. I brought my laptop down with me to back everything up, however I thought that I had the proper adapter, when in fact it was my old black Macbook’s. So I had Amazon Prime send another one, but I didn’t get it until Wednesday. Once I got it, and opened up the images, THAT”S when I saw that pretty much ALL of my images were jpeg and not RAW!!!! The evening shots on Sunday? Jpeg. Everything from Monday? Jpeg. The mummers? Jpeg. Those sunrise images? Jpeg. So every single time I turned off the camera for any length of time, I had to keep putting it back to RAW even though my settings were set to RAW, it still defaulted to jpeg. I couldn’t find a way to fix this 🙁 If anyone here knows what to do about this, please leave a comment…or if you’ve had a similar experience I would love to know about it.

Later on that day, we went to Castaway Cove so that we could go on some rides. It’s pretty much next door to our motel.

These are video stills:

Taken from the top of the ferris wheel.
Of course we went back to Shriver’s for some fudge…They still make taffy and fudge on the premises.

Eventually I’ll get to the video, but for now these are what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday of our week’s stay. If you missed my last post click here to get caught up, thanks!