Nikon P90 and Other Musings
Long time no post, I know. It’s been a busy month with work as clients are all adjusting to the “new” economy and replanning their businesses. Two trips to Austin, another to Minneapolis, and one coming up to San Jose. In between there was Elevation 2009, and a bunch of snowboarding.
Last week I was in San Diego because Adam was on break from teaching and came out, so we met up at Mickey’s house. Good spending time with the boy and Mickey, seeing my dad and hanging out in the city and Hillcrest. Adam headed back out on Saturday and on Sunday Mickey and I and a group of 7 others (including Kent!) went to Magic Mountain. Drove back to Mammoth on Monday, picking up Caleb along the way, who hung out here until Thursday.
While in San Diego I picked up a new camera. I thought I had lost my little Sony, but of course it turned up yesterday. But I wanted a camera that would cover a bit more ground than a pocket one, especially one with better optics and zoom. So I went to Best Buy (of course!) and picked up the Nikon P90.
12 megapixels, 24x zoom, a compact size and a pretty good price. I looked at SLRs, but they were all heavier (translation: less likely to be taken along) and way more expensive (translation: not likely to go anywhere it might be remotely damaged). The Nikon seemed like a good combination.
I haven’t had a lot of chance to play around with it yet (work, work, work) but I did take it to the beach last week in San Diego just to do some test shots. Yes, it was Black’s Beach, which in my opinion is one of (if not the) most beautiful beaches in California. Yep, part of the beach is nude but that had nothing to do with it. Seriously. Nice, warm beach.
One of the reasons the beach is nice is because it takes work to get there, either by walking a long way north or south along the beach, or walking down (and then climbing up) really steep cliffs. This pretty much filters out a lot of the crowds in the summer, though it can still be busy on hot days. This being April, not busy.
I took this picture from the top of the cliff path looking northwest using the widest angle/zoom. I uploaded the pics at full resolution, so they take a bit to download.
In the upper center of the above picture along the beach there’s a rock outcropping (where rays often hang out in summer), which I focused on from the same spot atop the cliff and used the highest zoom setting to get the picture below.
Pretty damn good I think. I’m looking forward to using the camera more around the Sierra and catching wildlife (since you don’t have to get close enough to scare them).
A couple more shots – this is one from the beach looking south.
The buildings in the distance at right are part of La Jolla. As you can see, Black’s is a huge beach. It’s also a big surf spot. And it’s part of my former stomping grounds since it’s just below UC San Diego.
Heading back to the car, what goes down must go up – and this is a shot of one of the two cliff trails that lead to and from the beach.
That’s it for now. As I type this it’s snowing. On the beach last week, in shorts and the sun on Sunday, snowboarding in warm weather this week, and now snow. Yeah, it’s April.
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