Had a great day sailing today aboard bluQ with Honest Eco Tours. We actually got under sail which was a surprise for July. I was glad we didn’t have to motor the entire way. We explored several areas around the Key West National Wildlife Refuge. Our stops included a kayak trip around a mangrove island where we enjoyed seeing a number of frigatebirds. Our next stop was a sponge garden. The sponges filter the water at a rate of 10x their body mass every ten minutes! No wonder they make for a great indicator about the water quality. While snorkeling around the garden we enjoyed the sights of large hermit crabs, a yellow spotted stingray, numerous lobsters, and many fish. While we were underway, we also got to enjoy a few dolphin encounters. The most exciting was a family with mom, dad, and about a 3-month old baby. After exploring the water, it was time to explore a little of Key West. The heat was a scorcher and we couldn’t muster the gumption to head over to Duval Street with the main Key West activity. Instead, we stuck around the historic seaport. The photos in this gallery were taken with […]
Ok, so this post’s title is a little play on words. You see, I’m planning all of my photography stuff ahead of the first vacation of the year. I’m really looking forward to leaving work behind for a bit and heading to Key Largo. With any luck, there will be some good exploring of the many Florida Keys between Largo and Key West. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks trying out a variety of recipes for the Fujifilm X-H1 and I think I finalized the list tonight: – Fujica Half– Florida Summer– Kodachrome 60s– Zero Hour– Bad Ink– Kodak Ektar 100– Default Florida Summer is my own recipe. I’ll be posting about it soon once I finalize it. Still tweaking it a little. Default is a standard Provia recipe with no tweak when I want a “clean” look. The gallery shows the five main recipes in order. I don’t have any with Kodachrome 60s yet, but it’s included as it’s part of the latest challenge for the Fuji Recipes Facebook group. I think it should give me a good mix of subdued vintage, beachy colors that pop, gorgeous night scenes, black and white, and nostalgic looks.
One of the hazards I’ve run into now that I’m really digging into the film simulation capabilities of the Fuji X cameras is keeping track of which recipe I used on a particular image. I often shoot the same scene with multiple recipes to compare/contrast. Sure, I could do this in Fuji X Raw Studio, but I find it’s easier to do it the old fashioned way. The downside is that sometimes I don’t record it accurately in my pocket notebook. Or I leave my pencil behind like I did today. That’s where exiftool can come in handy. If you’re not familiar with it, exiftool is a very power command line utility for reading/writing image data (EXIF, IPTC, etc.) You can read everything or just a particular group of data. In its most simple form, you simple pass it the image filename. There isn’t a lot here that’s real useful, so let’s see what Fuji writes to the image. Now we’re getting some cool stuff. I can see things like the Color Temperature and even the Film Mode (sim) that I used. Unfortunately, Fuji doesn’t write the custom setting anywhere (at least that I’ve been able to find). Let’s break […]
