Scattered Thoughts . . .

For this trip, Lukey was using one of my smaller Panasonic cameras.  At the zoo, however, he had a fairly long zoom lens mounted on it so he could zoom in on the animals.  Although it had pretty good reach, physically, it was a smaller lens.  T his "medium-long" lens was smaller than the lens that Kenzie was using but his camera was probably a hair larger than the camera Kenzie used.  Putting aside the physical size differences of these little cameras, as I mentioned in the previous blog entry with Kenzie's zoo photos, I think both Lukey and Kenzie had to get used to having that zoom available.  Until this trip, they had always used my cameras with a single focal length prime lens...  no zooming available.   I'm noticing that Kenzie seems to gravitate toward seeing and capturing the whole scene whereas Lukey seems to like picking a subject and zooming in on it.  Neither is necessarily better than the other although the zooming in that Lukey d...

Kenzie was carrying one of my smaller Sony cameras while we were at the Cincinnati Zoo and she captured a few nice photos.   The camera she had at the zoo was the same camera that she often uses while visiting our house so she is familiar with this camera.  Lukey had a different camera that he sometimes uses to photograph Kenzie playing soccer or figure skating.   While reviewing Kenzie's photos, I noticed that she rarely used the zoom function of the lens I had mounted on her camera.  I think this was because she usually uses a fixed prime lens with no zoom when she uses this camera at our house so I think she kept forgetting that this lens she had on this trip was a zoom lens.  I noticed the same with some of Lukey's photos.  I think it took both of them a little while to get used to having that zoom available. Kenzie started the day with a selfie...  Hmmm...  now that I'm looking more closely at this photo, I think maybe I offered to ...

After Friday evening baseball games, the Cincinnati Reds have what they call Fireworks Friday and we happened to be in Cincinnati on a Friday night!   Sheila and I had actually talked about getting tickets to this game but, while we were planning this trip many months in advance, Sheila reminded me that we had no idea what the weather would be like.  I had no desire to sit in the rain so we scrapped that possible activity for our visit.  We knew that, at the very least, we could walk over one of the bridges to Kentucky or hire an Uber to see the fireworks so we figured we wouldn't miss the fireworks show.  Plus, we hadn't told Kenzie and Lukey about the fireworks so that was a bit of a surprise.   We got lucky in that our "high floor" hotel room was looking directly toward the ball park and the Ohio river.  This meant that if we turned out all the lights in the room to eliminate reflections, then we could watch the fireworks from the comfort of ou...

As I wrote in a previous blog entry, our short trip from our hotel to Cincinnati Union Terminal in the middle of the night was uneventful...  and very quiet.  Catching this train in the middle of the night was a piece of cake.  It was still about 90° outside in the middle of the night but it was nice and quiet with absolutely no logistical problems.   The only remarkable event on this night was that we had to check our large rolling luggage...  four pieces in total.  There were four of us and we had packed for a two week trip anticipating sweaty clothes everyday so we had quite a bit to pack.  We each had a rolling piece of luggage and a small carry-on bag.  Fortunately, we planned for this possibility (needing to check our big luggage) so had already put everything we might need on the train in our carry-on bags so this was a painless change of plans.   We had already planned for this because we knew that these new Viewliner II tra...