Fun Photos from Fredericksburg

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Last Saturday morning, October 19th, the Austin Shutterbug Club had an outing to the lovely little town of Fredericksburg in central Texas, near the Hill Country.

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Only 5 people showed up. Not sure why. Don’t really care. Those of us that did make it, had a really fun time!

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All of these photos were taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, and the Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 “kit lens”.  I also had 4 excellent prime lenses in my camera bag, but I never used any of them.

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Reminder: You can always view any photo at a larger size by just clicking on it. You will then need to use your browser’s “Back Button” to return to my story.

I did not take any “street photography” photos of people doing interesting things in their environment.

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That morning, I was only interested in taking photos of whatever color, pattern, or object that caught my attention.

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Snapshots? Sure. Why not?

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There are only a couple of photos that the viewer would recognize as someplace in Fredericksburg. The majority of them could have been taken anywhere.

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It is late October, and Halloween is near.

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I believe that these two steeples belong to St. Mary’s Catholic Church.

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That was as far west as we walked. On the way back, I noticed that there seemed to be lots of places for people to sit along the sidewalk.

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Some seating was pretty rustic.

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And some was rather unusual.

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I wonder how comfortable that seat would have been for the framer sitting on his tractor years ago!

Here’s a photo that even says “Fredericksburg” in the photo. This is the 2nd story of the building. I even used Lightroom 5’s new healing brush feature to remove the power line that crossed in front of it.

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The 5 of us had a great German lunch at a place near the west end of town, named Friedhelm’s Bavarian Inn. I had the Jager Schntizel. It was great!

Thank you for stopping by and visiting my blog today.

My Favorite Photos from Our Summer Cruise Vacation

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It’s been a while since I put up my posting showing the hardware build of my new computer. All of that hardware worked just fine, so the only snags that I hit along the way were software related. Getting my HP LaserJet printer networked was pure joy, as was the discovery that some software installed by default from the Epson scanner installation disk (ABBYY Fine Reader) will interfere with Microsoft Office 365 in such a horrific manner that you cannot even open Outlook to read your email.

Anyway, all of those issues are now behind me, and I am very happy with my new computer! In the end, I set it to max out at 4.4 GHz, even though I could get it to run at 4.5 GHz long enough through a torture test of software to put me at #32 on the ASUS ROG RealBench LeaderBoard for the Intel quad-core systems (on October 5th).

After I got my new computer up, I had to get Barb setup on my old computer, and then prepare her old computer to give to Goodwill. All of that “computer cascading” takes time. So it wasn’t really until yesterday that I really had time to sit down and enjoy using my new computer, instead of working on some computer issue.

So yesterday I went back through the photos that I had taken on our cruise vacation in mid-August, and just selected my favorite 20 photos to share with you for this blog post. (I didn’t say my “best”, but rather my “favorite”.) You have already seen one of them.)

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All of these photos were taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera, and the Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 “kit lens”.

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Reminder: You can always view any photo at a larger size by just clicking on it. You will then need to use your browser’s “Back Button” to return to my story.

All of these photos are shown in the chronological order that I took them in. I do not have a story to tell that links them all together.

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All of the photo up to this point were taken on the ship, which was the Carnival Magic. The next few photos were taken in Key West, Florida.

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Even though you’ve seen this next photo before, I still wanted to include it in this “favorite 20 photos” blog post.

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This next photo was taken while we were in the middle of our Key West Pub Crawl.

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No, the guy on the ground isn’t real… he’s part of the artwork.

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The next day was spent in Freeport, The Bahamas.

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These were all taken in the tourist marketplace next to where our ship had docked.

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This guy was chopping off the top of coconuts to make alcoholic drinks. It took me several attempts to capture the action the way that I wanted to.

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The shore excursion that we enjoyed that afternoon was a ride on a glass bottomed boat.

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Later that afternoon, I went out on our balcony and watched a couple of tug boats bring in a cargo ship into the harbor.

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The next morning it was raining in Nassau, The Bahamas.

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Fortunately it stopped in time for us to go on our Segway tour of the beach!

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We got back to our ship by mid-afternoon.

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By then the skies had cleared enough that I was able to get a pretty good photo of Atlantis.

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The next two days were spent at sea.

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I love days at sea. I love to read a good book and to enjoy playing around with my camera!

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Here’s a good example of what I mean by “playing around with my camera”.

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No, that’s not a mistake… that was my best of 6 attempts to do that.

Thank you for stopping by and visiting my blog today!