One of the reasons we decided to stay in Cambria for our weekend getaway was because of its proximity to Hearst Castle. While I had stopped by Hearst Castle before, I had never taken the time to join one of the tours. This time around, we planned ahead and took a morning tour of the the upstairs suites. The tour inside lasted about 40 minutes and then we were able to roam the grounds outside for as long as we liked. Our tour guide had a lot of personality and gave us a great deal of insight into the history behind William Randolph Hearst and his historic mansion. I think my favorite parts of our visit was the indoor Roman Pool and the spectacular views of the coast from the grounds surrounding the mansion.
Blog
Long Weekend in Cambria
My wife and I took a road trip up the California Coast recently to Cambria, a scenic little seaside village located on Highway 1 halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. We stayed in a small hotel on Moonstone Beach Drive called the Cambria Landing Inn & Suites. The room was nice and the location of the hotel let us explore the beach without getting in our car which was a big plus. During our stay, we tried out the local restaurants in downtown Cambria (our favorite was Robin's), relaxed, and enjoyed morning strolls along the Moonstone Beach Boardwalk. It was a great weekend getaway and just what we needed to recharge after a busy couple months at work. I didn't spend much time shooting on our trip, but I did capture the following images during those morning strolls on the boardwalk.
Revisiting London
I haven't made it out to shoot since we visited San Francisco last month. As is often the case, I've fallen into a bit of a rut since returning from our trip. At my wife's encouragement, I decided to dig into the archives and revisit my images from London. I don't take the time to look through my old images as often as I should, but whenever I do, I usually discover at least a few new shots that I overlooked during my initial edit. Here's a set of images I put together from London that includes a few new discoveries from my latest look through my Lightroom library.
Morning Long Exposures in San Francisco
We stayed along the Embarcadero near the Bay Bridge during our trip to San Francisco. This gave me a chance to shoot some early morning long exposures of the San Francisco Bay. I photographed the Bay Bridge at sunset the last time we visited San Francisco so it was nice to catch a couple sunrises this time around. Here are three of my favorite images shot on two consecutive mornings with the Fujifilm X-T1 and XF 14mm and 60mm lenses.
28 seconds at f/11
90 seconds at f/11
45 seconds at f/16
San Francisco and the X-T1
As I mentioned last week, I sent back my first X-T1 because of the light leak issue. Well, thanks to a timely post on Fuji Rumors, I was able to order a second X-T1 in time for our trip to San Francisco. The X-T1 I received from Amazon has a serial number higher than the ones noted by Fuji here and I confirmed before our trip that the light leak issue has been fixed, at least for my camera. In addition to fixing the light leak issue, I was pleased to find that Fuji seemingly addressed the issue with the 4-way directional pad buttons. While there is no confirmation of this from Fuji, the buttons on the directional pad of the camera I received have noticeably more feedback than the original X-T1 I returned. I wasn't able do a direct comparison since I sent back the first X-T1 before ordering the second, but I definitely find changing focus points less challenging.
With that, I'll leave you with some images from our time in San Francisco shot with the new X-T1 and XF 14mm, 35mm, and 60mm lenses . By the way, all of these were edited in Lightroom 5.4 using the newly available Fujifilm camera profiles. I'm really liking the new profiles so far and I have a feeling I'll be using the VSCO Film presets less and less going forward. If you haven't updated Lightroom yet, I suggest you head on over to the Adobe website to download the update now.
