After a bit of hiking on day 1 of a 4-day Inca Trail trek, you’ll get to the Inca farm town of Patallacta, here seen from its similarly-named neighbor, Llactapata.
But before I prattle on for too long, I suppose I should talk a bit about names. Continue reading
This is Salapunku, the first ruin you’ll see on the first day of a 4-day Inca Trail trek.
It was located next to a canal, so may have been involved in administering water from it. Otherwise, from what I can uncover, it was just a little Inca farm town.
It now overlooks the rail line to Aguas Calientes / Machu Picchu Pueblo — so any local ghosts don’t get much rest these days.
Every journey has to begin somewhere. Since travelers on the Inca Trail are fairly tightly controlled of late, a journey on the Inca Trail starts at a checkpoint. In this case, the checkpoint at the km 82 marker (measured from Cusco — possibly along the river, or possibly along the rail line, I never asked).
Before I hiked the Inca Trail, I naturally did the modern thing and consulted the font of wisdom that is the Internet. Quite a few sites talked about the cardiovascular challenge of the trail, the risk of altitude sickness, etc. Before I hiked the trail, though, I didn’t appreciate how helpful resistance training would have been.
The normal brief description of the 4-day approach to the trail goes something like this:
This is generally accurate, but an over-simplification. Continue reading
So I recently returned from a trip to Peru — including a hike along the Inca Trail, a good chunk of time spent in Machu Picchu, even more time spent in Cusco, all sorts of good things. I plan on writing up a number of blog posts on things I saw and experienced — but first thought this might be helpful to future Machu Picchu visitors (it’s a sign at the entrance, laying out 25 things you may not bring to / do in the site):
Bottom line — there’s lots of inaccurate information online w.r.t what is and isn’t allowed into / at the site of Machu Picchu. So, since the above text is a bit small, here’s the posted list of restrictions (as of May, 2018), along with my comments on them: Continue reading
There’s been some discussion online about ways to use the Olympus E-M1II‘s dual slots, so I thought I’d write up how I use them — in the hope that this is useful for other owners of the camera.
So, first off, three things:
Updated 14 May, 2020 to discuss the E-M5III and E-M1III.
Anybody that’s had an Olympus digital camera in recent years can attest to the fact that they are highly customizable. Possibly, almost too customizable.
So I’ve gotten into the habit of revisiting my custom settings a few times a year, just to fold in what I’ve learned about a given camera model through use, and to see what improvements I can make for my personal style of shooting. And of course, there is plenty of user-generated information out on the internet, so it’s good to give yourself an opportunity to learn from new things other people have learned and written about (personally, I’m a big fan of wrotniak.net and biofos.com).
So in my last sweep of the E-M1II‘s custom settings, I thought it was about time to revisit how I handled back-button focusing. As I mentioned in a previous post some months back, this is easy to do with a custom “MySet.” And commenters pointed out that by setting “Mode 2” for the camera’s back lever (a.k.a. the Fn Lever), two separate sets of focusing settings could be easily managed. But unfortunately, Fn Lever Mode 2 just “captures” three things — focus mode, focus target shape, and focus target location. So you can use it to switch between auto-focus and manual focus easily, but you still don’t get back-button focus from it, at least not with this one setting alone.
I’ll admit, I’m new to solar eclipse photography, much less to post-processing of solar eclipse images — so I’ll freely admit to being on a learning curve here. My previous post contained an image put together from 7 photographs, using some commercial HDR software. Subsequently, I found two helpful videos on how to do a similar thing using Photoshop (and it’s a pretty quick process, too) — here are my results:
This took a bit longer to produce, but I like the results better. Your thoughts?
So, with about half of North America, I plan on driving to the path of totality for the upcoming Total Solar Eclipse on August 21. I was originally going to write up some tutorial information on this, but since so much of it is already available, I thought it best to primarily link to the sites I think are most helpful. Continue reading
Quite a few people have been posting the photos they’ve taken of moving things (birds, athletes, race cars) using their Olympus E-M1II cameras in what’s called “Pro Capture” mode. Basically, Pro Capture on the E-M1II brings to Olympus what only a handful of cameras have had to date — the ability to buffer in-camera some frames before the photographer presses the shutter button all the way down.
Given the normal delay in human reflexes, this sort of feature allows a photographer to capture a decisive bit of action, even if they mash down on the shutter a bit late. Lacking race cars or even many birds to try this out on, I was lucky to have a rodeo to work with. The bottom line is that Pro Capture worked well in the vast majority of photos I made — but a few frames concern me.
