I'm not a huge fan of long-distance driving, so that part wasn't especially fun. Although it was pretty neat to see my Prius getting close to 50 MPG. It gets closer to 40 MPG when I drive around here; I have no idea why it was getting so much up there, but I'm not complaining. May I also say that I've become a big fan of Rain-X. The drive from Raleigh to Norfolk had some degree of rain for most of the way, and I barely had to use my windshield wipers.
Overall, the trip was great, and I had an awesome time. But there are two main things I wanted to talk about here. The first one is photography. I had a lot of photo opportunities on this trip, and it was the first time in a long while I've done any kind of photography that wasn't about events and/or people. I started in Virginia at Back Bay Wildlife Refuge. They don't have a lot of wildlife around in November, but I got some decent landscape shots. More importantly, I tried looking at things differently, and thinking about composition and form and shadow and all that. I'm making it sound a lot fancier that it really was; basically, instead of finding a good angle of a pretty landscape and taking a picture of it, I tried picking out things that would make an interesting image on their own (in addition to all the pretty landscape pictures--there were still lots of those.)
(At left is an idea of what I'm talking about. It's still a landscape, but the top branches of the trees sort of match the shape of the clouds, so it all blends together to make an interesting image. Kind of. Looking at it now, I'm thinking I should crop it tighter to emphasize the treetops and clouds more.)
I was in D.C. for a week. My BFF was there from LA, working a conference or something; so, I got to spend some time with her, and still had lots of time on my own to wander around. On one of my wandering days, I went to Great Falls National Park, which is kinda northwest of the city, but so was my hotel, so it was only ~5 miles away from me. I'm glad I did my research beforehand and found out about this place, because it's really pretty and a great spot for picture-taking. I continued with my thing of taking lots of landscape shots, but also trying to single out other things to make images of. This time was a lot about individual trees. The leaves were changing color, but not all over the place. There were a few trees that stood out because they were a huge splash of color in the middle of what was still mostly green.
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| Tree. Color. Sun. |
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| Full view of the falls. Definitely worth the visit. |
Possibly my favorite part, photography-wise, was the Botanical Garden. I bought a used macro lens just for this occasion.
[For those who don't know, a macro lens is one that is capable of focusing very closely and creating an image on the sensor that is exactly the same size as the real-life object (or 1/2 the size, or whatever, depending on the particular lens.) It doesn't sound like much when you're talking about a sensor that's less than 1 square inch, but once you get the full-size image onto a computer, it's a whole new world of images.]
The main problem with macro photography is that it's not easy to do. Especially when you're hand-holding your camera. The area of focus is extremely small, so even small movements of your hand can throw everything out of focus. Serious macro shooters use tripods and/or rails and take a long time just to set up a single shot. As someone who bought a cheap, used macro lens, I was not a serious macro shooter; but I still managed to get some pretty neat shots.
I got a Groupon for a one-year membership at Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, so I'll definitely be doing some more with this lens in the coming year.
Last stop on my trip was Charleston. I was pretty much only there for a day, but I did get a few pics in at a place called Shem Creek, which is kind of a boardwalk tidal area with lots of birds. I got some really good close-ups of this one:
So, anyway, it was a really good trip for photography. For anyone interested, my pics from the trip are on my Facebook photo page:
https://www.facebook.com/Photography-by-John-Bollinger-120497828017373/photos_stream?tab=photos_albums
But the best part of the trip for me was getting to see a bunch of people that I dearly love and hardly ever get to see. And I got to see 5 of them in the span of two weeks. There's not much else to say about it, except I noticed that every time I hugged one of them, it was like a real, serious hug. Normally, when I hug someone, it's just a polite little affair--like, okay, we're friends so it would be weird to just shake hands to say hello and/or goodbye, so let's do this perfunctory hug. From an emotional bonding standpoint, it's basically the same as shaking hands. But with these five people, it was more like a hug that said, "I love you and it's been way too long since I've seen you," and it just made me feel so good. Normally, I try to hug people kinda loosely, because I feel like they're doing it just to do it, not because they actually WANT to be that close to me. But when you hug someone and they hold on to you tight, and you know they really mean it, it's just...life-affirming. Or something. I think this is why I feel so incomplete a lot of the time, and why I'm so desperate to get into a relationship with someone. It's those little physical affirmations that humans need on a daily basis--they're kinda like emotional vitamins--if you don't get them, you start to get emotionally sick. Personally, I probably have the biggest case of emotional scurvy EVER....
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