photography: Provincetown 2023

 I wasn't sure if I would be able to take my end of year trip to provincetown Massachusetts this year. The hotel I usually stay in doubled it rates and going to the states has become more of chore for me lately. However, a friend who has a condo there rents it out and gave me a really kind offer and I was able to stay 5 night for what would have costs me for 2 so I took advantage of that and was able to wander around and take a photos in at least one place I have never been to before.  I only spoke to one person I knew while there the entire trip which was very nice for me because I go there for solitude. Provincetown is super active in season but the opposite off season. I was also recovering from my first case of Covid and had (and still have weeks later) a terrible cough. So while being sick while away isn't ideal, it's better to be sick in a place you can do things by yourself and come back to your place and just sleep or do nothing.

(click images to see larger versions)

There are three lighthouses in provincetown, one I photographed in detail last year, one I have never seen and one I kept seeing but could never get to on Race Point. It took three days of walking for hours and a quick cab ride to finally get there. It's not a road and there are no signs telling where it is. I was deposited on a fire road that became dunes and a sort of broken pathway that led to the lighthouse and it's accompanying buildings. Great! Well, mostly great. The one day i could get there was the same day as a snow storm the the photos I took were not exactly what I was looking for but managed a few good ones I hope. 

Other excursions took me all over Race Point and while I have taken nice images there before I was able to spend more time wandering all over. There are several structures there I find interesting and the dunes are always beautiful.

Lastly, I spent some time taking photos on and around commercial street, the main drag through the town in the daytime and also at night to sort of button up the images I have wanted ot take over the years and never got to. 

Photography: Herring Cove lighthouse and Provincetown MA, USA

 I was recently in Massachusetts for a week and spent a few days in Provincetown on Cape Cod, a place I used to frequent when I lived in Boston. It was very cloudy which made the day photography nice and interesting but I was hoping to get some night shots on the beach of the stars as well and that wasn't to be. That might have been for the best as I spent a day in-between tides on Herring Cove and noticed a couple coyotes were in the area but not paying too much attention to me. I found out after getting home that there have been a few attacks on the beach in broad daylight only a week before. 

One reason I went was to try and photograph a lighthouse on Herring Cove I have completely failed to capture on any of my other trips there. The last attempt I walked along the breakers to the lighthouse in a dense fog which turned out to be super dangerous and the fog was so think I got only 2 shots of a barely visible lighthouse. This time the day was great and I took the long way around and back via the beach. No one was around for miles... perfect for me. 

I got up at sunrise a few times to photograph the harbour and piers which went fine. There isn't a drastic sunrise and the sunsets, which are often amazing, eluded me this trip. 

Photos from Boston area visit

 I recently had to visit Boston, no easy task with the covid testing and restrictions. Getting around to anyplace was a nightmare but after getting there, it was super nice to see family and friends. I finally got to take out the camera and really takes some photos. Being stuck here on the island for a couple years sort of limited my subject matter. Another aspect of this trip was to not bring a laptop but only use my iPad pro which has a terabyte of space and with Affinity photo installed, should be enough to process most of the photos I take while away. This was pretty efficient and made travelling pretty easy. I did miss some plugins I use often but there is no reason I can't just take the iPad with me from now on. Once Affinity gets a tablet version of Publisher released, I should be able to do pretty much everything but 3D works it. I am used (spoiled) by my 27 inch screen but the tablet screen was, honestly, more than good enough while running around from place to place. 

Click images to see them larger.

Provincetown.

I never get tired of this place and the beach, dunes and town are always changing enough to keep my camera lens trained on it. I was super lucky to be there when a boat got beached in nearby Turo. 

Boston

Boston has changed so much since i lived there that it is now an unfamiliar place to me. I got lost a couple timesaver got my bearings back. I took new photos of places I had photographed 40 years previously, with limited success. I also spent some time in Quincy Quarry with a friend and that was interesting.

Newburyport

I have been here before and it's really lovely to walk on the wood pathways to the beach. I have only been in wintry times so the place is always pretty much deserted, my favourite way to visit anyplace! 

Barcelona photos and my iPad experiment

So I am back from Barcelona and overall, my iPad experiment worked as well as I thought it would. I was able to save all my RAW files to the external hard drive and process ones that interested me on the iPad in Affinity Photo. Since the iPad could only transfer jpg and png files, it did limit how much I could get done. It seems like in September with the release of the iPad IOS, that could change and the who process will be simpler.

I only had the base iPad, so while most photos were fine to work with, HDR and panoramas were really, really slow. Another issue on this trip was when Air Transat lost our luggage until the afternoon before we left! In the luggage was my second camera battery and charger and my plug for the iPad. The made keeping things powered up a problem and I had only one battery for the entire stay which drastically limited how many photos I could take.

With the hard drive option now I can see myself leaving the laptop at home more often. I also has to make a change in a poster for a client that I had uploaded to DropBox, just in case. I used Affinity Publisher to make it and was able to download, open, edit it in Affinity Designer and then send the finished PDF back to the client all while sitting in a park near the Sagrada Familia.