About Us


We are a married couple who retired and moved to Thailand in 2014. You are welcome to join us and our travel monkeys Sun Wukong and Malcolm Jr. on our adventures! We hope you enjoy the trip as much as we do.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Not Paparazzi .... Not Professional

One of the things that I have always wanted to learn to do well is photography. I don’t aspire to be a “professional” but I definitely want to be able to create good photos that I would be proud to share. Retirement will offer me that opportunity and I look forward to learning. It will allow me to post some decent pictures to the blog so our friends and family can keep up with our adventures and actually see what the heck we are talking about.
A couple of years ago I purchased a Canon T3i to begin the adventure. When our son and daughter in law decided to move to Japan they wanted to get a good camera to take pictures to document their adventures and share on their blog. I gave them the Canon setup figuring that I could replace it before we retire.
I decided to do some more research about cameras and see if there was another setup that might work out better for us. I found that when I used the Canon it was nice, but also heavy, and Lin has much smaller hands than I do and she just wasn't comfortable using it.
So about a year ago we decided that the way for us to go was with a micro 4/3 camera. They are smaller bodied, lighter, and still take some awesome photos. Here is what we bought:
Olympus OMD – EM5, 3 additional lenses, a decent flash unit, and the additional battery holder/grip.


Sometimes it is just too cumbersome or obtrusive to carry around and whip out the DSLR. In those cases we use the point and shoot plus that we have. It is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS4. It is submersible to 40 feet, is GPS enabled, takes full HD video and it can also be used in manual or aperture priority mode unlike a lot of similar cameras. Why did we get the blue one? It was on sale at the time for $75 less than the other colors. Yeah, I like blue just fine.


I have been drooling over the GoPro HERO 3 Black because of all the neat things that you can do with it during various activities. I’d gone back and forth about purchasing one and justified not getting one because they are a little on the expensive side for another camera to our collection. Then….it went on sale and I channeled my inner female and decided I just had to buy it. After all …. It was ON SALE! That means you have to buy it. At least, that what I have been told. And so were a lot of the mounting options and other goodies. Got them too.


So, that’s our camera lineup for our move. In addition to our camera phones we think we should have most of the bases covered to add some neat photos and videos to the blog. We have the geocaching app on our phones so we will discover all the geocaches in Chiang Mai and The_Geomonkeys will be placing more around the Chiang Mai and Hua Hin area when we move.  Geocaching:  Using a billion dollar satellite system to hunt for Tupperware in the woods.
Now….about that quad copter.

4 comments:

  1. Nice! Geocaching sounds like it could be a pretty good little adventure. Definitely interesting in Thailand!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Geocaching is pretty awesome. Folks put caches in areas that are meaningful to them. We have found more beautiful places finding geocaches that we never knew even existed in our own area. There are caches in CM and around the area so we are sure we'll find some awesome hidden treasures there.

      Delete
  2. I'm struggling with the same thing. What to bring with me. My Nikon DX and 2 lenses are a bit to cart around but I've always been wary of a little camera not taking the quality shots I am used to. I have no experience with video...yet. So I will let you guys figure it all out and then I'll suck your brains like the famous CM mosquitos...how about that?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The small cameras take pretty nice pictures actually. And the video isn't bad either. It is a 12 megapixel camera. You aren't able to take close up pics from far away but otherwise we've been happy with them. We've had a few of them over the years.

      Delete