In the Imperial Hallways

I went over to Baihei Island in Beijing to visit some of the older parts and see what it looked like inside some of the temples. As you can imagine, everything was quite detailed and ornate. There was even some amazing food that was prepared for us by a chef at the restaurant there. And then, to my surprise, this richly decorated woman came out to serve it to us. As she was walking back through one of the old hallways, I asked her to stop for a second so I could take a photo. And yes, this was taken with the Sony NEX-7. All of my new photos from China were taken with that camera… I have an upcoming photo if the island itself in coming days… maybe even tomorrow!

Auto-Awesome on Google+

So I went to the Chinese Acrobatic Circus and after the event, I uploaded all the photos to Google+. It was so cool to see that it made a bunch of animated GIFs automatically for me.

Baihei Park Island in Beijing

It was a beautiful and still night when we arrived. This park is quite huge and it can take well over an hour to walk around the whole island, so there wasn’t a lot of time to catch a good location for the setting sun. Luckily, Tom had been to this spot before, so we were able to quickly get in position. Good sunsets are really rare in Beijing because of all the smog, but this evening came out nicely because of a strange pink-purple light that burned through the smog/fog as the sun set.

A view of the city from the Hollywood Hills

One night, Tom and I went up to the top of Runyon Canyon to shoot the city. On the walk up, I liked the view of one of the palatial Hollywood Hills homes through the valley. I zoomed in with my 28-300 mm lens to get this shot. If you’re ever in LA and looking for some new types of city shots, take a hike around Runyon during the sunset. You may find some cool scenes!

The View from CN Tower in Toronto

While walking around the top of the tower, I was taking photos with both cameras – the Sony NEX-7 and the Google Glass. Of course, I ended up getting better photos with the Sony, and here is one of them below.

The Mighty Trees at Glen Oaks Big Sur

I was able to use Stuck On Earth to find a lot of great places in Big Sur! By the way, don’t forget that you can now get it for iPad AND Android. We are glad that so many people are enjoying it! Anyway, don’t forget that one cool feature that lets you download all the photos in a given area and add them to a new trip. This came in handy here… I just kind of vacuumed up all the good spots into a “Big Sur Trip” with a single click!

Here’s another photo from that amazing place I stayed in Big Sur. It’s called the Glen Oaks, so be sure to take a look at this place when planning a trip to the area! It’s fun to take photos of these huge trees. The difficult thing is getting a sense of scale. So it’s good to use things in the photo like humans or houses to give everything a sense of perspective. This trick also works with caves or anything that is impressively huge in real life.

The Golden Seaspray

It’s fun to take photos of waves exploding on rocks. You never know what you’re gonna get, so it’s a good idea just to take a ton of photos. I must have taken 50 or 60 to get this one. It’s a lot of guesswork involved! In cases like this, maybe I could have done even better with the Sony NEX-7 instead of the D800. The thing is that I could have hit that 10 FPS, and it would have come in very handy! One of the main problems with the NEX-7 would NOT have reared its ugly head here — the buffering. You can get enough shots when the wave hits and then just wait for the buffering to catch up while waiting on the next wave!