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New Photography Website

I have moved my blog and photo galleries from our Samco Family website into this new rick.samcos.com website dedicated to my photography and travel work. If you wish to be notified of new blog postings, click on the RSS Subscription button at the upper left and choose your method of notification.

This new website was created using WordPress, together with The Turning Gate’s CE4 WordPress Theme. All photo galleries are published using The Turning Gate’s Lightroom plugins (Gallery, Auto Index, & Publisher in the CE4 product family). All provide a “responsive” display of high quality images on all kinds of devices.

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Website migrated to new server

This website has been hosted on the same Linux server technology at GoDaddy for almost ten years and it has been increasingly showing its age. And there have been recent problems which didn’t have any work arounds. So, I finally bit-the-bullet and spent the last couple of days moving samcos.com to a modern-day cPanel Linux server. You shouldn’t notice any changes … if you do, please let me know. This change is a pre-requisite for a future website change that you will notice: upgrading the site to the newest version of The Turning Gate+WordPress software.

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Trip to Portugal & France

Martha and I scheduled 5 weeks at our shared Provencal house in October & November and we decided to tack on couple of weeks in Portugal beforehand. Some friends had raved about walking Portugal’s Rota Vicenta a year earlier, so we decided to follow in their footsteps (literally).

I only took my pocket-sized Sony RX100 camera with me since it didn’t appear that I’d have much dedicated photography time, nor be able to go shooting during the early & late “magic light” hours. It turned out that that was definitely the case and I was very happy not to be carrying a pack filled with a heavy SLR camera and lenses while walking in deep sand.

All the trip’s photo galleries can be found here: Portugal & France Galleries

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New Pocket Camera

I just purchased a new Sony RX100 Mark III model to replaced my 2 year old original RX100. Although the new camera’s sensor is exactly the same as the old one’s, there were three principal reasons for getting the new model:

  • The Mark III has an electronic viewfinder (EVF) — I found it very difficult to see a scene and the camera’s settings on the previous camera’s LCD screen, especially in bright light; I am finding that the Mark III’s EVF is a huge improvement;
  • The Mark III’s lens goes down to a 24mm wide-angle equivalent; I found the previous camera’s 28mm to be a bit constraining;
  • The Mark III has much improved menus and extended parameter settings; especially useful is a greatly increased range of exposure bracketing choices.

I am again mounting a Lensmate filter adapter on the camera so that I can use polarizing and ND filters (although the Mark III has a built-in 3 stop ND capability). After using the new camera on last weekend’s Broken Top hike, I have decided to take it on our upcoming Portugal and France trip (in lieu of my Canon 5D Mark III SLR camera and lenses).

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Day Hike around Broken Top

Lake at Base of Broken Top
Lake at Base of Broken Top

I just published a set of images and panoramas that were taken on a Labor Day Weekend day hike around Broken Top. We hiked from the Broken Top trailhead off of FS Road 370 to the unnamed lake on Broken Top’s northeast side. We then came back around and continued up into the crater on the south side.

Broken Top Gallery

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