So I’m the one who is rarely in our travel photos — always the one behind the camera. Photography has always been a hobby, dating back to my early high school years, when I was taking black and white photos on an old Leica camera of my dad’s and developing them in the darkroom at school.
Center: Quartz stone formation, Alabaster caverns State Park, Oklahoma, summer 1979.
Right, top: Tip-off of PHS Girls 4A state championship game
Right Bottom: Still-life study of a flower arrangement at Ackley Florist, Pratt, KS, 1980
As a storm chaser photography takes a large role in documenting and reporting weather conditions
As you may be able to tell, these and most of my chasing photos are taken with my cell phone. Usually, they look like this:
When reporting a weather phenomenon, location is extremely important. So I try to not only put items in the photo that will help identify the location, but I use photo software that image stamps the copyright info along with the precise location, direction I’m looking, GPS coordinates, and date/time of the photo. Several National Weather Service warning forecasters have told me this is very valuable to them when they see the images on Twitter.
A lot of my previous Alaska photos are that way, too.. but here are a couple that don’t have that 🙂
This trip, photography is one of the main activities for me
Two years ago, I lost a good friend to COVID. Steve Boleski was part of my chasing team for a few years, and was an excellent photographer. He was going to help me learn the things I needed to know so I could take much better photos on this trip. Here are a couple of my favorites of his work , and the tribute I wrote to Steve before last year’s chasing season:
Revising the equipment
Before, I’ve taken my Nikon D3300, an 18-55mm lens and a 55-300mm lens on vacation. But on Steve’s advice and because I found I was spending too much time “changing glass,” I am renting an 18-400 lens so I can accomplish more without having to change lenses so frequently. I will take the smaller 18-55, as there are some times a larger lens like the 18-400 will not be a good thing to carry — tight excursions, etc.
I’ve also added an action cam, and will be using it when we snorkel in Acapulco, as well as for some times when I just want to video what we’re doing — I’ll wear it when we’re walking onto Encore for the first time, as an example. So here’s what’s in the photo backpack:
I’ve brought several 256GB SD cards for the camera and six or so of them for the action cam. I also have two, 2TB external SSD drives, so I can empty the camera cards regularly. All together that should give me more than enough capacity for photos and videos so I don’t have to ever consider preserving RAM space for later.
FWIW this bag also carries my laptop, tablet, and will have our envelope of important documents in it. As you can imagine, this bag won’t be out of the hands/sight of me or my wife at all in the airport, on the plane, or from the hotel to the ship…and we’ll be switching the camera and lenses to a smaller bag for daily carry.
I’m looking forward to meeting some other photographers on the cruise and learning from them.
and then