very simple

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my camera system last week. I had been looking to move on from my Nikon D80 for a while. It was a workhorse, but it was also a decade old, and had seen better days. In particular, it had severe ISO limitations and really couldn’t shoot at night or in low light, which became painfully evident when I got nothing but noise last summer in Wyoming when we all stayed up all night trying to shoot the Perseid meteor showers in the beautiful clear skies. I had been looking at just upgrading my Nikon base, but after some advice and research, and the exhaustion of lugging around a giant SLR (and knowing that most of the newer Nikons were even bigger and heavier than the D80), I decided to go in a different direction and go with a mirrorless Olympus system instead. So I’m testing it out. I’ve got a lot of new things to learn, reading through the manuals and figuring out the settings, menus, etc., but in the meantime I’ve been carrying it around with me (it’s small enough to carry in my purse) and taking this Memorial Day weekend to do some deep diving. I’ve still got a bunch of photos to sort through and edit, but in the meantime, here are a few shots from my commute to work on Thursday morning when I was really just getting my “camera legs” going.

In addition, I’m finally attempting to move away from Aperture before it completely dies on me – I still despise the way Adobe Lightroom organizes photos using reference files, and I’m completely opposed to their entire subscription system, so I’m avoiding that for now and retrying the upgraded version of Photos. It’s still terrible by itself as an editor, but now that they allow extensions, there have been a few developed over the past six months or so that seem to have real promise, so I’m willing to give it a try in the hope that it continues to evolve (with third party help) into a total solution. As someone who primarily only does color correction and minor cropping in any event, I’ve never needed the real “power” tools of something like Photoshop.

In order…newsstand turned coffeeshop by the subway, escalator stairs, grand central terminal in motion, and the incredibly ornate office building in which I work…