3. Long distance relationships period (2)

... continue from: Long distance relationships (1)

I purchased my second camera: Canon 5D Mark IV. It was one of the flagship cameras from Canon at the time that many professionals use! I don't remember the exact reason behind this purchase, but I probably had enough money saved up and the desire to take my photography to the next level. 5D Mark IV is indeed better than 6D, and the upgrade was noticeable in many aspects.

My girlfriend visited me again, and we went to Lake Tahoe. Besides photography, I was also considering cycling as a hobby. Back in college, when I had no car or motorcycle, I used to cycle to the nearby mountains and joined my University's cycling club. But somehow, riding a bike doesn't feel as enjoyable anymore, so this hobby didn't take off.

We went to San Diego for my friend's graduation ceremony. I almost went here for my graduate degree, so I was curious to see what I've missed!

I bought my first wide-angle lens! It was the classic Cannon 16-35mm F4 L, and I immediately used it to try capturing a timelapse from my apartment.

So far, most of my trips have been either with my girlfriend or my friends, and I seldom went alone just for photography. But I started to want a better success rate during the outing, so I decided to go alone this weekend to try the Milky way shot.

I went back after this failure and did some research on the Internet for where to best take pictures of the milky way around Silicon Valley. I quickly decided to go to Henry W. Coe State Park the next day.

We went to Mt Rainier again for another hike around Sunrise Visitor Center. This time it was a clear day, and we were able to see the magnificent mountain herself. But I was disappointed when I saw the pictures from my computer later. I felt like I didn't do the scene justice and wasted my time with many bad shots. I even tried using Apple Photos to post-process the image a bit, but no luck.

My girlfriend came to California, and together with our friends, we went to Point Reyes National Seashore for the coastline and the Elk.

It was my turn again to visit Seattle. This time we went to Olympic Nation Park with friends.

Suddenly it's fall again! I saw an article from https://www.guruin.com/articles/1321 about the beautiful fall color around Mammoth Lake and High Sierra. I was super impressed by the article and shared it with my friends to see who was interested. It turns out people all wanted to go, and we ended up having a big group of 10+ people on this trip!

I was looking forward to getting some good pictures, so much so that I woke up early for sunrise.

But I didn't know how to pick a good sunrise spot, so the images were still only looking ok. I'm happier with the photos I took for my friends, though. Everyone seemed to have a good time with the trip. As an organizer, that's a big relief.

I was also really into shooting directly into the sun to show how sunny the day was. It looks super cool on the back of the camera but not that impressive on the computer. There's also tons of glare that makes the image looks dirty.

I started to get very hungry at getting good pictures. It doesn't matter if it's wildlife, friends, or whatever, as long as it looks beautiful or meaningful to me. I'd gone out almost every weekend to shoot something, with or without friends.

I also started doing basic post-processing on my pictures to make them look a bit better. Since I always import my photos to Apple Photos, I use its built-in editor to make basic adjustments like brightness and colors.

So this and the previous post pretty much wrap up the long-distance relationships period of my life. Because one this one day, my manager told us that our team would be dismissed by the end of 2017 😅

I had already started to feel a bit bored with what our team was doing back then and started thinking about switching teams. But I had no idea the company would dismiss the team without much hesitation. I'm pretty happy personally because now there's no reason for me not to relocate to Seattle to be with my girlfriend anymore.

But before I moved in Feb 2018, we went on another epic road trip during Christmas and New Year holidays. Stay tuned for the next post!