Check out these Sarasota Beach Hotels images:
Ft. Lauderdale hotel balcony, Feb 2011 – 20
Image by Ed Yourdon
Okay, so this one wasn’t shot from the 9th-floor balony of my hotel room … I was down on the boardwalk for a short stroll, and decided to add this to the collection…
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I didn’t expect to be here in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; I was supposed to be in Sarasota, checking out places where we might be able to escape the increasingly unpleasant winter season in the Northeastern U.S. But the weather this winter was sufficiently unpleasant that my outbound flight was canceled, and my backup flight was canceled after I had gotten as far as Philadelphia … so I spent an unexpected night at an airport hotel, scrubbed the whole Sarasota visit, and came to Ft. Lauderdale instead, since I knew I had to get here eventually for a computer conference that I’m speaking at …
I ended up spending a night at a Marriott hotel on the beach in a part of Ft. Lauderdale known as Hollywood — not to be confused, of course, with the glitzy section of Los Angeles out on the West Coast. To make up for the unpleasantness of getting down here, I decided to splurge and spend a few extra bucks to get a room on a high floor, with an ocean view and a balcony. It might have been a great place for a winter vacation if I could have stayed longer, but it was a relaxing contrast to the long, miserable trip down here …
I had brought with me a brand-new Sony alpha-55 DSLR camera, intending to try it out in Sarasota; it didn’t occur to me that I might use it instead in Ft. Lauderdale, and I didn’t have any particular interest in walking up the long boardwalk that stretches along the beach strip … but I couldn’t resist spending a few minutes out on the balcony in the late afternoon, enjoying the cool breeze, the surf, and the sound of the waves.
The tide was out, and people were wandering around out in the shallow water and exposed stretches of sand; gulls and terns wandered around also, presumably looking for morsels of food. So I decided to pull out the new Sony camera and take a bunch of shots. Because I was using it for the first time, I had forgotten to check the white-balance setting; most of the images were shot with the WB set for indoor fluorescent lighting, but because they were all RAW images, I was able to adjust the color temperature.
Unfortunately, they’re all handheld shots, taken at a super-long telephoto zoom setting (approx 400mm equivalent on a 35mm camera), from a 9th-floor hotel balcony, of subjects who were probably a couple hundred yards away. So they’re not as crisp and sharp as I would like them to be … but at least I learned enough about the camera to use it more effectively next time.
By the way, the reason I got the camera was that (a) it combines still + video shooting, (b) it’s got a "swivel" LCD monitor, which I’ve gotten very fond of on my Canon G12, (c) it’s got built-in GPS for geotagging photos, (d) it’s substantially more compact than my bulky Nikon D300/D700, (e) it’s got a "translucent" mirror, which doesn’t flip up when an image is recorded, thus allowing a maximum of 10 frames/second, and (f) it’s substantially less expensive than a comparable video+still Nikon or Camera. I’ll let you know what I think of it after I’ve shot a few thousand pictures with it…
Ft. Lauderdale hotel balcony, Feb 2011 – 24
Image by Ed Yourdon
Okay, so this one wasn’t shot from the 9th-floor balony of my hotel room … I was down on the boardwalk for a short stroll, and decided to add this to the colletion…
********************************
I didn’t expect to be here in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; I was supposed to be in Sarasota, checking out places where we might be able to escape the increasingly unpleasant winter season in the Northeastern U.S. But the weather this winter was sufficiently unpleasant that my outbound flight was canceled, and my backup flight was canceled after I had gotten as far as Philadelphia … so I spent an unexpected night at an airport hotel, scrubbed the whole Sarasota visit, and came to Ft. Lauderdale instead, since I knew I had to get here eventually for a computer conference that I’m speaking at …
I ended up spending a night at a Marriott hotel on the beach in a part of Ft. Lauderdale known as Hollywood — not to be confused, of course, with the glitzy section of Los Angeles out on the West Coast. To make up for the unpleasantness of getting down here, I decided to splurge and spend a few extra bucks to get a room on a high floor, with an ocean view and a balcony. It might have been a great place for a winter vacation if I could have stayed longer, but it was a relaxing contrast to the long, miserable trip down here …
I had brought with me a brand-new Sony alpha-55 DSLR camera, intending to try it out in Sarasota; it didn’t occur to me that I might use it instead in Ft. Lauderdale, and I didn’t have any particular interest in walking up the long boardwalk that stretches along the beach strip … but I couldn’t resist spending a few minutes out on the balcony in the late afternoon, enjoying the cool breeze, the surf, and the sound of the waves.
The tide was out, and people were wandering around out in the shallow water and exposed stretches of sand; gulls and terns wandered around also, presumably looking for morsels of food. So I decided to pull out the new Sony camera and take a bunch of shots. Because I was using it for the first time, I had forgotten to check the white-balance setting; most of the images were shot with the WB set for indoor fluorescent lighting, but because they were all RAW images, I was able to adjust the color temperature.
Unfortunately, they’re all handheld shots, taken at a super-long telephoto zoom setting (approx 400mm equivalent on a 35mm camera), from a 9th-floor hotel balcony, of subjects who were probably a couple hundred yards away. So they’re not as crisp and sharp as I would like them to be … but at least I learned enough about the camera to use it more effectively next time.
By the way, the reason I got the camera was that (a) it combines still + video shooting, (b) it’s got a "swivel" LCD monitor, which I’ve gotten very fond of on my Canon G12, (c) it’s got built-in GPS for geotagging photos, (d) it’s substantially more compact than my bulky Nikon D300/D700, (e) it’s got a "translucent" mirror, which doesn’t flip up when an image is recorded, thus allowing a maximum of 10 frames/second, and (f) it’s substantially less expensive than a comparable video+still Nikon or Camera. I’ll let you know what I think of it after I’ve shot a few thousand pictures with it…