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Ocean City, Part 3

August 12, 2016/0 Comments/in personal /by Deirdre Ryan

Thursday the family wanted to do some indoor activities, and Ocean City, NJ has quite a few of these.

I had a ticket for a free round of indoor Haunted Mini Golf, but first we did a laser type of challenge and a really cool mirror maze. I only posted 2 pictures because I don’t want to spoil too many things about it it. It was a lot of fun, and air conditioned! We had to wear plastic gloves to keep things clean, because everyone touches those mirrors.
Henna tattooing..

We encountered a dead horseshoe crab…
It did start to rain, my husband and daughter went to go see a movie, I stayed in the motel room to read my book and watch the Democratic National Convention. To be honest, part of me wished that I could’ve been there with a press pass photographing the event….

Friday we checked out and headed to Margate to see Lucy The Elephant, a 6-foot high structure in the shape of an elephant that you can con into and climb to the top. Lucy is a great destination for everyone to see at least once and we lucked out with the weather. She is listed with the National Park Registry of Historical Landmarks and is one of New Jersey’s many treasures. Our daughter had never seen Lucy and she really enjoyed her.

Before heading back we came across a fantastic place to eat, DownBeach Deli and Restaurant. I had the best potato knish in years there, it was heaven!

The week seemed to have caught up with our little one as you can see, and she slept the entire way pretty much on the way home.

We did spend a lot of time on the beach, I’m not sharing all of my personal photos here. But here is another thought of mine on the Panasonic Lumix 100 LX camera:

I do LOVE this camera, truly I do, and with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS100 I was hoping for some improvements and sadly all I saw was a smaller sensor and a slower lens. DPReview gives it a Gold review but for those that want a zoom lens that stops to only f5.6 instead of the maximum aperture of f/1.7-2.8 that the older Lumix 100 LX gives you then it’s not for me.

The Lumix 100LX had a few miss focus’s, even when I had the spot focus on. Once I opened them up, I saw that they were back focused. Perhaps it was the camera that I was renting? Hard to say, but even with the multi-focus points I found that I had to re-compose quite often. I did enjoy the manual focus feature on it, and used it a few times.

People complained about the overall size of this camera in past reviews. Personally, I can’t stand a super tiny camera! Now I have small hands, but I like the bulk of certain cameras because I feel that I can use the stabilization of it for certain shots. I come from the days of film, heavy cameras, those things were made of metal. So I LIKED the way that this felt, and it was still lighter than my usual gear. So what that it doesn’t fit in my pocket!

This was my second time renting it, the first time I got it for the East Coast Comic Con earlier this year. I haven’t posted those yet, but I might later today or next week 😉

In case you missed them, here are my other posts:

Ocean City, Part 1

Ocean City, Part 2

August 11, 2016/0 Comments/in personal /by Deirdre Ryan

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!

Ocean City, NJ Part 1

August 10, 2016/0 Comments/in personal /by Deirdre Ryan

We had just visited my grandfather at Vet’s Memorial Home in Vineland, NJ and driving to Ocean City, NJ to start our family vacation for the week. My friend Veronica, a professional photographer, was coming down the next day to take family portraits of us, Tuesday was my parent’s wedding anniversary, and most of all…we wanted to have fun.

I saw the message on Facebook’s private messaging app…something like if this was a sick joke..but sadly it wasn’t. Our dear friend Patrick Cashin died suddenly in his home. http://www.clownlink.com/2016/07/rip-pat-cashin/

He was only 47 years old, married to the love of his life, with 2 boys and was a professional clown. His memorial will be this Monday.

We got unpacked at our motel, The Coral Sands, got our daughter settled, and then my husband and I broke down and cried. Pat was his childhood friend, and his sister Lillian’s best friend, so they grew up together. My friend here in Bordentown just so happens to be married to his best guy adult friend, John.

Pat would’ve wanted us to have a great time in spite of what happened. Regardless it was very hard to do, neither of us wanted to be online with Facebook unless it was to interact with our friends about our friend.

So here I will now continue, to post….
I rented the Panasonic Lumix LX 100 and my husband rented a GoPro from www.borrowlenses.com. I didn’t want to walk around with my large DSLR and lenses for this trip.

So we went to go eat dinner at Ike’s Seafood and then had a gelato at Shriver’s. We stayed up pretty late, but that’s what you do when you’re on vacation down the shore 🙂 The next morning I woke up wicked early, got my coffee from Ocean City Coffee Company(they were handing out free coffee samples that morning) on the boardwalk, read my book on the beach. Then I met my husband and daughter, and we rode our bike to Ovie’s for breakfast. At 8:30AM they raise the flag every morning on top of Maui Wowi’s.

She wanted to wear that thing on her helmet….

Later we really just hung out inside our room, getting ready for our photoshoot. It was REALLY humid, so since my mother and I have naturally curly hair, we stayed inside until it was time. We met my friend in front of Shriver’s Salt Water Taffy and Fudge, while we waited I took a few photos.

We brought our $5 kite to use as a prop and I took a few photos of our daughter flying it while my friend took pictures of her as well.

She brought an assistant and she had fun flying the kite too 🙂 My husband helped with the reflector a little, he is my assistant as well, so he knows what to do! Here Veronica is posing my dad and our daughter.

Afterwards, there was a major storm coming, so we went to dinner at Ocean Cafe on the boardwalk. Here you can see the clouds forming…it was coming and it did, although not as bad as it hit the rest of the state that day and night!