Shooting Beach People

This should be an interesting entry, as I've been about 40 hours without sleep and just had two glasses of wine -- so bear with me. If I confess to kidnapping the Linbergh Baby or being D.B. Cooper it's just the lack of sleep and intoxicants.

We arrived in Sydney around 8am, which was 6pm to our internal clocks. Being the good American tourists we are, first we spent too much for a ride to our hotel (80 bucks!) and then we paid too much for rooms with a view of a brick wall (but they're oceanside rooms!) Each time we were told what a great deal we were getting, and we were in no shape to argue, so we capitulated.

We were also told to stay up as late as possible today -- it's the best thing to get your body's clock reset to a new time zone. So even though I know better, I drank a diet red bull and two coke zeros and we went for a walk on the beach.

Lovely beach, this Bondi beach in Sydney! Gorgeous setting, large beachfront, not too crowded, lots of foofey shops and a wonderful beach walk -- who could ask for more?

I figured the best thing to do was to get back into shooting DSLR again. I love my DSLR, but it takes a while for me to get into the hang of it. Quite frankly, I'm more at home with landscapes: it appeals to my desire to set a million different parameters. So I felt a good start was to try to shoot people.

People are very tough to shoot.

Aside from the two topless women sunbathing (pictures not included), we saw a lot to shoot. Here's Day 1 of Daniel's Back-in-the-saddle DSLR exercise.

This is the type of shot most folks probably bring home from Bondi beach

These volleyball players gave me the best shots of the walk
I should have stayed around and shot them some more

This girl just came from nowhere, sat on a rock,
and stayed there until I had finished shooting 7 or 8 shots.
Then she left

I wish I had gotten some better action shots
I think beach volleyball lends itself naturally to practice people-shooting