Well, I went on my camera club's annual fall colors workshop. I didn't get to go to the full week-long workshop, but I did get to go for a few days and had a blast taking photos and fellowshipping with good photography friends. We stayed in a log cabin house that was very large and nice where the dozen of us stayed.  We had an itinerary of places to go all week long rising up early in the morning and coming home late.  These workshops are really "work," but they are fun also.  Waterfalls and fall colors are our goal, but we try to do new things also.  This year we did light painting with waterfalls which was a new adventure for us, but it turned out well.  I always try new things while on the workshop and really decided to go fully to mirrorless and to a crop ASP-C sensor on one of these workshops.  Every year I have failures and successes and really learn a lot from both.  I had no real hard failures but had a couple of surprise successes.

The first was my lens arrangement that I was to take and use while there.  My main lens, a Sony-Zeiss 16-70 f4 lens, didn't change.  It was wonderful and I got some great shots with it.  It had a polarizer on it most of the time because of shooting around water and we had some rain that would have produced a lot of glare.  I probably used this lens 80-90% of the time, and it was sharp and quick.  My long or telephoto lens was a 70-200mm f4 Canon L lens, a great lens, and it really worked well.  I am using a Metabones adapter to fit it to my camera and it works well.  Maybe not as fast as a native lens, but it works well for me and it's sharp.  I brought a Sony 35mm f1.8 and I never took it out of the bag.  Then it comes to my real dilemma, which wide angel to use.  I originally intended to use only a Rokinon 12 mm f2 lens but then thought about the Sony 10-18mm f4.  I went back and forth many times, packing one to go on the trip and then the other.  I finally decided to take both since I was driving and storage space was not a priority.  I did take both but only used one, the Sony 10-18 f4.  It was sharp, fast, and made beautiful photographs.  I was very pleased.  This is a lens that I haven't used too much before and was actually thinking of selling it.  But no more.  It will be in my bag for a long time.  It gave me some of my best photographs of the whole trip.  The Rokinon is a great lens, and I will keep it for astro photography because of its wide aperture. 

My next biggest experiment was to go without a laptop and only use an iPad.  This was not the success that I thought it would be.  I was using a 10.5 inch iPad Pro 2018 model.  It worked well enough but wasn't the laptop that I enjoy using.  I also like to use Luminar 3 photo editing software in conjunction with Lightroom, and I couldn't use it with my iPad.  I was also using Lightroom or the mobile version of Adobe Lightroom Classic, which is not as strong of a program as the classic version.  I joined the iPad with a WD Passport SSD Pro which is a Wifi enabled SSD hard drive that I could hook up the iPad with.  The drive worked well.  The only problem I had was operator error, but I learn quickly.  The iPad did work okay, but I much prefer editing on a laptop.  My travel laptop is a MacBook Air and, although not as powerful as a MacBook Pro, it does work well and is lighter.  So on my next big outing the MacBook Air will be the computer of choice for my editing of images.

My next experiment was to use screw-on filters instead of the 100mm Lee filter system I have used in the past.  These filters are a smaller and more compact choice and match up well with my Sony mirrorless system.  The brand that I used was Breakthrough Photography Circular Polarizer and Neutral Density filters.  I got one set of polarizer and a 3 stop Neutral Density at 72mm, the largest size of any lens I have, and use step-up rings to attach to different lenses.  I only used this combination one time as it was cloudy or overcast, and I only needed my polarizer most of the time.  It worked very well and will be my system of choice for my small mirrorless system.

My last experiment was letting my camera sync with my phone via bluetooth to get GPS information.  This was the biggest success of all of my photo experiments.  It worked flawlessly, and all of the photos that I took with my Sony A6500 I can go to the map section of Lightroom and see where I took them.  This is a very useful tool to have in my toolbox. As a landscape photographer, I can easily forget where I took a photograph.  But with the GPS info embedded into the metadata, I won't have this problem again.

The only thing that didn't work well was that I had to leave early and couldn't stay the whole week long.  It was a sad day when I had to drive home the last day knowing all of my photo buddies were still there having a photo adventure. One of the best things I ever did was to join a photography club.  If you ever have the chance, please do so.  If you live in eastern NC, come visit GAPC (Goldsboro Area Photography Club).  We meet once a month and have workshops and outings every month.  We have one big trip per year (week long), and we participate in Help Portrait, a program where photographers give back to their community.  Well, that's enough for now. Get out and shoot!