Back in July, Holly and I took a rather lovely trip to California. We had been invited to a wedding and decided to extend our visit for a substantial vacation. I had just gotten my new camera which was not coincidental. As I was researching which camera to get, I had an eye on the calendar knowing that I wanted to have it in hand so I could take it with me. I ended up getting a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV which showed up about a week prior to our trip. I was able to go out for a photo walk with my new gear to start getting a feel for how it worked, although I was still going through a learning curve while on vacation.
The wedding was in Sanborn County Park in Saratoga. We had flown into San Jose and stayed in Cupertino. We walked around Cupertino and I took a few photos using my EF 24-105mm f/4 lens. Although that lens is a bit big and cumbersome, it seems to be a nice all-purpose walking around lens. I also brought that lens with me to the wedding.
The day after the wedding, we drove to Carmel-by-the-Sea where we planned to stay a few days. I had been to Carmel once just for an afternoon, but Holly had never been there. Based on my limited experience, it seems like a good place to have a relaxing vacation. Holly and I had both spent a fair amount of time in nearby Monterey so I knew we’d be close to a place we both enjoy in case Carmel left anything to be desired. Turned out, we absolutely loved Carmel. The weather was perfect. We had a pleasant corner room at the Svendsgaard Inn. We were just a few blocks from the ocean and had plenty of restaurants and wine tasting rooms close by to choose from. We were able to park our car and just walk everywhere.
On the way to Carmel from San Jose, we stopped in Santa Cruz and Monterey. I had decided that for the drive down and for our first day in Carmel that I was going to use my EF 17-40mm f/4 wide angle lens. I wanted to get more practice with it since it posed a different shooting experience than I was used to.
I was more pleased with these photos than the ones I had initially taken my first time out in Philadelphia.
For the rest of the trip, I went back to my all-purpose walking around lens which I’ll write about later.
These photos are only a fraction of the ones I had taken. I have a complete set of our trip on Flickr.
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