Two more wallpapers from Puerto Rico and Sand Dunes for those who want to download and use them as backgrounds. Both panoramic images were shot hand-held with the Nikon 24mm f/1.4G and stitched using the method described in my “Panoramic Photography Howto” article.
This is the final part of my trip to Puerto Rico and the last images from the beautiful Old San Juan and the fort. Part one can be found here and part two is here.
The Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G is very wide on FX – so wide, that it can fit lots of foreground in the frame. On one side, it is very nice, because you can highlight the front objects, but at the same time it can be a little negative, since it makes background objects look tiny. Here is where a large cannon used to stand before:
And by walking a little closer to the shore, I got this beautiful view:
After a long delay, I’m now trying to sort through some of the images from San Juan. Although I only shot for a couple of hours, the day was just beautiful and opportunities for photography were limitless. Old San Juan is a beautiful place and I was amazed by its history, size, textures and colors.
As far as gear, I mainly shot with the Nikon 24mm f/1.4G and Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G and both turned out to be excellent for street and architectural photography. The body was my favorite Nikon D700.
Beautiful streets of Old San Juan:
It all started with my flight from Denver to Atlanta, where only about 10 passengers in total boarded the plane. It was an early flight, but a very pleasant one, since I got to sit where I wanted and really enjoyed the flight in a very quiet environment.
After arriving to the busiest airport in the world, I thought things would change, but they didn’t – only quarter of the plane to San Juan was occupied, which was once again very nice.
Despite bad weather and very limited amount of time, I somehow managed to capture over 1000 images in Puerto Rico. It took me a while to go over everything and pick the images I like the most, so I now need to extract a few images and post them here :)
I took three lenses with me to Puerto Rico:
1) Nikon 24mm f/1.4G
2) Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G
3) Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G VR II + 1.7x TC
I tried to use the 24mm f/1.4 the most in different lighting conditions and apertures. Despite what others are reporting about this lens, specifically its focusing issues, I have not seen a single image where the focus was incorrect. Whether I shot something up close or a distant object, all images came out tack sharp from center to corner, as reported in my Nikon 24mm f/1.4 Review. Not sure if there is a batch of bad 24mm lenses out there, but mine is working flawlessly and I did not notice any problems at all.
Here is the first picture I took at the El Conquistador resort in Puerto Rico:
And the last image of the resort on the day of departure:
The above image is a panoramic image stitched with 4 vertical images. I did not have to correct any distortion issues before stitching the panorama and Photoshop did a pretty good job in aligning everything together. More to come!
This post was supposed to be called “Blogging from Puerto Rico”, but it didn’t work out and you can probably guess why. No, not because I was having too much fun :) I was just too busy and my schedule was so packed that I only returned to my room to sleep. On top of that, the resort that I stayed at wanted me to pay for the Internet at a ridiculous rate and I’m one of those people who believes that charging for Internet services at hotels is just plain wrong, especially after they over-charge you for the room, food and drinks.
After last week’s snow in Colorado, I thought I was heading out to a nice and sunny weather, but boy, was I wrong. The day I arrived to PR, it was rainy and windy and it stayed that way until today. I really wanted to capture sunrise and sunset shots and the sun would not even show up until noon, before it got cloudy and rainy again in the evening.
I had a couple of hours of available time today before my flight, so I left the hotel early in the morning and checked out old San Juan. I did not want to spend much time on the streets, so I went directly to the old fort that was built by the Spaniards back in the 15th century to defend against the English and the Dutch. The fort was spectacular and I think I captured some nice shots there, although I do wish that I had more time and my tripod with me :) I will post some pics tomorrow.
By the way, if you are wondering about the title of the page, I really am blogging from an airplane using Apple’s iPAD. The WiFi service is pretty fast and I even downloaded some apps from the Apple store.
Stay tuned for some pictures tomorrow!
