Attack of the Location Photographers

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After a day of computers being uncharacteristically not-smart, I headed to Orange Beach after work with the smaller camera, which stays with me most days.    

My route was Bravo Tacos (awesome place, plus they show off some of my prints), Wolf Bay Park off of Canal,  Alabama Point, Gulf State Pier then Billy's Seafood in Bon Secour (which I hope to return to [with permission] for some shots of the shrimp boats soon).

It really wasn't the most productive outing for me.  My mojo was off.   Might have been the little camera, I might have been in a mood or something but I was feeling oddly "tired of" the same old locations, which I normally don't feel.  It might have been the crappy news that Ben, one of the partners of Bravo Tacos died unexpectedly last January.    A young guy - decent dude and talented chef, passing away from a needless injury bums me out a bit.

At any rate, this outing the photographers were out in full-force.   At the Alabama point Florida side, the usual spots were tied up with photographers shooting families in white polos.   The rocks at the pass, mostly.   I counted at least 4 distinct groups of people + photographer (amateur or professional / who knows - doesn't really matter).

One that was fun/ unique was at the parking lot of the pass, opposite side of the street from Cobalt Restaurant was this old VW Bus.   It caught my eye b/c there was this awesome puddle in the parking lot that formed a really cool reflection shot potential of the bus.  My shots didn't work out, though.  I didn't have an angle on the bus that wouldn't potentially intefere and these folks were working afterall.

For interested locals, the allknowing Google leads me to believe the photographer with the cool VW Bus angle is Beach Chic Photography: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Beach-Chic-Photography/134747069898188?v=app_2373072738

I headed to the Gulf State Pier where I really struggled to find any decent captures.   The photographers were all around here as well.    A few hundred yards to the east, some people were "all-up-in" the sea oats and dunes in a way that I'm pretty sure isn't cool with the environmentalist types.  Around the pilings, the pier, the walkways, I think I counted another 5 groups of people running around doing the beach portrait bit.

Here's my pro tip for anyone looking for beach portraits.   Wait until November.   It won't be so hot and the opportunities for great compositions are endless because the beaches are almost completely deserted. 

Here in this shot, if you'll look to the right, you'll see the unmistakable pose of someone getting their beach / sea oat family portrait on.

Runway on a Distant Island

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From Drug Trade to Disney, this island runway has a story. 
In the 1700's Gorda Cay was used by Pirates.  Perhaps beneath the sands or tree groves of this 1,000 acre island, secrets remain from their time.    

Then, in the 1960's businessman Alvin Tucker saw investment potential for this little island.   He bought approximately 150 acres and set about clearing a portion for a runway.   This runway.

A deserted island, just miles from Nassau, with a runway became a handy stop for drug runners moving their product into Florida.  Tucker was unable to curtail their activities and the land was essentially sold off.

Fastforward to 1997, Disney purchased a 99 year lease from the Bahamian government for the entire island and spent nearly $25 million outiffting it as a Cruise stop for their Caribbean cruises.  Rebranded as Castaway Cay, today an abandoned plane still sits on this runway as a reminder of its seedy past.   Instead of planeloads of cocaine, the runway ferries tramloads of adults to a 18 or older beach area known as Serenity Bay on this part of the island.

Riding on the back of that tram I looked down to see the runway markings and caught several images of the area.   At the time, I thought it was your typical clever Disney construction. "Oh,it looks like an old runway - how clever."  Turns out after some research, it was legit.   A real runway used for all of the purposes that you could imagine for a runway on a deserted island in the Bahamas..

Currents

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Near the bow of the Disney Cruiseline ship, Dream, sits this little bar, called Currents.  

There are several such bars on the ship.  

The family asleep, tuckered out from a long day of riding in the car, packing/unpacking and general ship excitement.  I laid in (the very comfortable) bed, tossed and turned with the excitement of being underway (and not having to steer the boat, this time!)

I finally gave in, grabbed the camera and set out about the ship in a very late hour to explore.    The time/date stamp on thie image is incorrect, I know it was about 2-3 am because the ice cream and pizza counters had closed and these bars were void of life. 

I walked to the bow of the ship and grabbed some shots of the bow cutting through the darkness, the radar domes and other sundry things.  Ran into a couple making out under the radar domes.  I wondered to myself "those intense radio waves can't be good for you" but decided it wasn't prudent to interrupt their session for an after-school special on radio waves and magnetic fields.   It was windy and some sections of the boat were intended to be "off limits" because of the wind.    

That didn't really stop me.

As I walked back mid-ship, a bartender was now at this little bar.   I asked if she was still serving, she said yes, so I bellied up to the bar and started chatting.

The bartender was from Crotia.  She had maybe 20 years on me and seemed friendly enough.  I liked that she wasn't flirty.  Flirty bartenders / waitresses annoy me.  I see it as a form of deception.  yeah, I'm wierd.

I learned that she had worked on Cruise ships for 8 years / Disney for 3.   She had come to Disney as a photographer, her degree in Visual Arts.   She found the Disney, Photopass photography-by-quantity business model to be unappealing, so now she made drinks.      

I found all of this out before she poured my first Kona Longboard.  In fact, she was way more interested in telling me her life story (and griping a bit) than pouring beer.     Still, there was something refreshing about the experience.   Here I was at 2 am, on a massive cruise ship at sea and in my discoveries I had found the rarest of things:

A Completely Honest Disney Employee

If you line 100 people up in a row and they are all smiling, someone is being dishonest.   Sometimes its comforting to find an unmedicated smirk on a human's face.  It shows they are human.    It isn't pessimism, just math.   Of 100 people, they can't all be super-happy-cheeryfied.  Someone has to have a late car payment, a sick relative, a fit of gas, a hangover, -- something.

Disney's customer experience training is world-class and world-renowned, so here she was, like finding a vial of unicorn tears in field of four-leaf clovers, an honest Disney Worker.  No fake smile, just being real and pouring beer a little too slowly for my preference.

Her story wasn't the story you usually hear from a Cruise line worker.  Her years at sea had served her family well.   She has paid for her home in Croatia, a home in Florida and her Mother's home in Croatia.  She covered her mom's substantial medical bills and still had enough left over to live comfortably and save for retirement, which was around the corner.   Disney had treated her well and the Disney guests had tipped well.

She was tired and annoyed at another coworker but saw my D800 and immediately spoke up on the topic of photography, which we covered thoroughly before the second Kona Longboard was poured into my fresh glass. Disney has a photographic machine, all targeted to the up-sale.   They shoot pictures with the characters, they harrass you at dinner and on the beach, they focus on the children and sap the parents for some pretty stout prices.   She had hated it.   There was no creativity to it.  

Just point, shoot, print, rinse/ repeat.  

(Not knocking you if this is your gig.  It is the life for some and not for others.)

Apparently serving drinks was her way of rescuing her personal love for photography.   By associating money with the work, it had reduced her passion in photography to something cheap, commercial.  

Nothing can mess a pure ideal up more than money.

So, she poured my last beer for the evening and I continued my roam about the ship.  She seemed satisfied with my 100% tip and remembered me on another night of the cruise as I fetched Margaritas for my wife & I.

About Arcades (and Console Video Gaming)

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Last summer, I set out to complete a project that has been on my TODO list for quite some time.    To construct a game room in the unfinished storage space beneath our house. (Kinda like a basement but not exactly- not-technically a basement since it on ground level)

Pictured above is the result as of today, though the room is constantly changing with different games trading / coming and going.  

Along the way I learned a ton about "The Arcade Business" which really sheds light on those near and dear memories of loitering as a kid at the Aracde in Greentree Mall in Clarksville, IN after the movies or as a teenager hanging out at Alladin's Castle in Cordova Mall in Pensacola, Florida.

I got reminded of my lessons recently, visiting the Arcade at The Magic Kingdom at the exit of Space Mountain and the Arcade on the Cruise Ship; with my daughter.   I like to visit these arcades to shop for future machine purchases and take in the sights and sounds. (Central Florida auctions are the source from which alot of games come to me, through various delears.)

Jena - she's in it for the claw machines.   She loves those stupid things and the cheap chinese-made toys they miserly dispense.

Some facts on the arcade business you may not have known.

That Golden Tee or Mortal Kombat machine you fed quarters into at the gas station was most likely owned by "An Operator".   The Operator would strike a deal with the business owner to put a machine or two on-location in exchange for a split of the take from the machine.  

A side-note-to-this-side-note, this is one of the first businesses that Warren Buffet engaged in, though his were "weighing machines" (scales) in barber shops and filling stations around town.

Operators are seldom game enthusiasts.  It is a business.   Some are technically savvy while others employ the use of some very bright technicians for repairs / upgrades.  The engineers are usually soldering-iron wielding electro-mechanical experts.   They are soldering on boards, removing capacitors and transformers and replacing them (often on-site) .  They can diagnose and fix a motherboard, a monitor.   A dying art in our disposable culture.

The machines would come from one of a small handful of manufacturers.  (Midway, Konami, Namco, Data East, Bally to name a few)   The machines themselves are really basically very big PC's.  A monitor, a marquee flourescent light, a motherboard, some speakers and a control panel filled with buttons.  Because of their size it was very common for a single machine to have multiple lifes as different games.    For instance, that Mortal Kombat machine, may have been Mortal Kombat 1, 2, 3 or any number of other games made by Midway with a similar button layout or cabinet wiring.   Just swap a board, the marquee and some art.  Bang, new game.

Now, here is the big one that you may not realize, though it seems obvious.  These are vending machines with games in them, not games with quarter slots.  The difference is the entire machine is built for the sake of the operator, not the player.   Sure, they want a game the player will play but the game's purpose from birth was to make the operator money.

As such, the games give the operators controls over things that will influence the capability to sap players for quarters post-haste.     Some examples:

My Midway Offroad Thunder behind Mario Kart:    It has a menu option to pick the percentage in which a player is allowed to score first place (and thus a free game).    So, in addition to difficulty, if this percentage is set to 10% then no matter how good of a driver you are you will only place 1st 10% of the time over aggregate.   Racing games make it easy to cheat the player.    It's easy enough to have a car pass you on the last lap, right before the finish line, etc.

My Mario Kart: Has numerous difficulty settings as well as a "pay anyway" option.  So, even if you win 1st place, it expects additional credits to continue racing but at a discount (at the operator's perogative)

 Fighting games are desigend for head-to-head play so as to keep competitors feeding quarters into a machine.   They are also designed to emphasize streaks over score, win/loose streaks equate to more quarters dumped into the machine on a 1-to-1 ratio.

Shooting games are built to be impossibly hard if you intend to complete the game.   We had a House of the Dead 4 for awhile.  It would take two players around $9 in quarters (on .25c plays) to beat the game completely, regardless of your marksman skills.     

Skill cranes are evil.  Little Jena loves these things but they are truely built with the operator in mind.   In addition to "packing tightly" the toys, the claw itself is almost always configurable.  How many inches the claw will close and how many ounces of pressure the claw will hold closed.   Less tight claws drop toys and generally get more plays.   

(I'm annoyed because Jena spent $25 in The Disney Dream's Arcade to get a .50c toy.   Their operators should be more generous, it's Disney for Pete's sake.)

This profit-over-playability focus wasn't always the case.   In the early days of Pacman, Tron, Frogger, Centipede, you would certainly pay to play but the gameplay was foremost in the game creators goals.   These games were built by small companies (relative to today) by game designers and engineers who were most likely a little more like Flynn from The Tron Movie than Bill Gates from Pirates of Silicon Valley.    (And probably on enough cocaine to smother a polar bear.)  EDIT: LSD.

They hobbled code and hardware together as best they could do bring to life something that had never really before been done.    What do you compare Pac-Man to?

...This is likely why the early classics remain nostalgic to most of us.   They were built for playability and creativity without the input of an army full of corporate psycologists trying to "get you hooked."  

As the 90's rolled on and arcades started to decline the games were more targeted at sapping your handful of quarters than insuring a pleasant experience.    That isn't to say they weren't fun but you shouldn't beat yourself up if you can't get to that 12th level boss on a single quarter.   You weren't supposed to be able to, by design.

Into the late 90's, a quarter no longer bought a postage stamp nor a single play of a premium game.   Operators engaged in a race-to-the-top in per-game charges. This problem originated at the manufacturers, who were struggling.    Consoles were eating their market share and machines started to get expensive.  The cost was passed to the arcade consumer.

A standard cabinet two player machine with a 25" monitor averaged about $2000
A standard sit-down driving machine with a 25" monitor averaged about $5000
    -- As did light gun games and other specialty machines, including Pinball

The prices you paid at an arcade jumped from .25 to as much as $2.50 per play.

People stopped coming.  Arcades went out of business or only thrived in touristy settings or as a side-attraction to something else. (Dave & Busters, Chuck-E-Cheese, Movie Theater Arcades)

Arcade gamnig went from a free spirited garage-startup developed cash cows in the 80s to huge conglomerate companies with millions of dollars in overhead swimming upstream against the rising tide of home-console ownership.   Cue the layoffs and supplier bankrupcies..

Contrast the 80's drug-fueled development to a more modern Bungie Studios (as of 5 years ago) working on Halo titles.     They actually measured capillary response of testers, ostensibly attached to some Doc Emmit Brown-inspired machine, as they played through Halo levels.   An attempt to measure the physiological responses to certain scenarios.

Halo, Call of Duty and other modern titles are engineered from the ground up to be addictive, especially in the multi-player modes.   They do this by withholding weapons, achievements and abilities until later levels with a good-bit of social interactive peer pressure added on top.  

Today, the console market leans you to online play, where sales become organic as friends need multiple copies to play versus one-another and Microsoft's X-Box Live charges a $50/year premium just to connect to their services.

Points and DLC, Leaderboards and In-game chat drive multiplayer experiences while game developers increasingly phone-in their campaign/single player experiences focusing on the more lucrative multiplayer audiences.

With the announcement of xBox One and PS4, I imagine we'll be in for more of the same in console gaming.   Bigger graphics, better sound(slightly), more online crap to accompany the game, more multiplayer.

(Which admittedly kind of annoys this 34 year old slow-fingered button masher who is tired of being matched with jobless agile-fingered smack-talking tweens who spend their summers perfecting their Kill to-Death ratios on casual gamers like me.)

And.. if you are really worried about the NSA reading your emails, don't think too hard on that Kinect sensor or Playstation Move Camera.   It's only a high-resolution infrared camera designed with the specific purpose to one day allow Microsoft or Sony to target ads based on the people in the room. (Oh, look, Dad's in the chair, Jr is on the floor playing, mom's in the corner reading and Spot is chewing on a bone near the couch, cue a Dog-bone ad..)    I'm sure the NSA wouldn't find any value at all in that military-grade infrared scan of your evening activities.

As for arcades?  The Verge wrote a great article here and essentially declares them as dead.  I'm not conviced but I see their point and I'm obviously a hold-out, being an enthusiast.

Today, just about any arcade game you can think of can be picked up from an Auction for  $300-$600, dealers selling to homeowners and collectors for $400-$800.  Pinballs are usually a bit more, coming in at $1800 to $3000 for something really collectible.   

Only one pinball manufacturer remains and most arcade mfgs are on death's doorstep, minimally staffed and only selling to one of a handful of suppliers left.

Those annoying redemption games (collect tickets for crappy chinese toys dipped in lead paint)  are king.

I think, we humans have a tendency to know when we are being rolled and that these too will fail over time.  

The unfettered nostalgia of sitting at a pizza parlor and playing pacman on a cocktail table or in a poorly lit arcade stacking your quarters up there, "I got next play" will likely live on in new ways.   Bar-cades, come-to-your-house birthday party in-a-covered-trailer bouncy castle/clown types or gimmicks like Dave-N-Busters will keep it up for another generation.

I know my four year old loves to grab his little Mario wallet full of quarters and run downstairs to play.    He doesn't quite understand "free play" but hey - neither did the Arcade Industry as a whole.  ;)

A Castle and a Tale of Two Cameras

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A completely unscientific experiment follows.   I wanted to share my results / thoughts.    

I don't get to travel that frequently. I rarely travel for business.  Heck, I work from home so I don't even commute to an office that frequently.   Lets face it, I milk the locales available to be locally for all I can, photographically.  Suffice-it-to say, getting to travel on vacation with the family once-a-year is a big/big deal to my photography aspirations.

Vacations are tough photo-outings, though.  The kids, the wife, the crowds.  It's important for me to keep in my mind that my family isn't on the same photo expedition that I'm on.  They are on vacation.  My wife graciously tolerates my f-stop bag full o' big camera goodies and rolls her eyes infrequently as I stop a million times from here-to-there and snap photos of random things.  I have to keep myself in check.  

I'm not a travel-photo-blogger (wouldn't that be cool), the amex in my pocket doesn't get turned in on an expense report.  I have chocolate milk to get, a diaper bag to often hold.   Kids that sometimes argue and bicker and a wife that would rightly like some assistance refereeing their matches.

However, I see these vacations as my only opportunity to snap photos of something different than my day-to-day surroundings.   As such, I come geared up and ready for battle, so to speak.   It is usually the D800, a 14-24mm (rented until recently), a tripod and a SB-700 speedlight.   The body to get me mega-resolution, the lens to get me super-crisp landscapes, the tripod b/c the lens doesn't tolerate movement and the speedlight b/c the red-light, light-meter keeps me out of trouble in churches and public places that frown on white-light metering that looks like a flash.

It has always been the trusty Nikon.   My D90, the D7000, now this D800.  Until this time.   This trip, I tried something radical (for me).   I left the big camera in the room (most days) and the tripod in the car.

I gave the Sony NEX-7 a shot to prove its metal.

(and it did) 

I thought it would be interesting to shoot one of my favorite spots of The Magic Kingdom with the NEX-7 one day and the D800 on another day.  The results are interesting.   

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(Above)
Cinderella's Castle Shot Handheld in a Bracket of RAW at +2, m, -2 with a Sony Alpha NEX-7, Sony 10-18 E-Mount Lens. HDR'd, Filtered with a "ColorChrome" Filter.  Some noise redux in Lightroom

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(Above)
Cinderella's Castle, a different day - a bigger camera Shot Handheld in a Bracket of RAW at +2, +1, m, -1, -2 with a Nikkor AF-S 14-24mm Lens. HDR'd with the +2, m, -2 frames only with a preset created while processing the other image. Same "ColorChrome" filter.  Some noise redux in Lightroom, some "cool" temperature adjustments

So, in the Red Corner, weighing in at the weight of a newborn baby, we have the D800.   Its 36 Megapixel sensor paired with the 14-24 Nikkor comprise what is agreed by most to be the Landscape Photography Dream Team.   Almost-medium format.  The Thrilla in the Manilla!!

In the Blue Corner, weighing in at the weight of a half-empty margarita, we have the Sony Alpha NEX-7.  Its 24 megapixel sensor paired with a rather-new and unproven Sony E-Mount 10-18 mm lens aren't a fully-proven platform for "serious" (ish) landscape photography.  But it has potential.

The results are interesting.  Was it an upset?  I think so.  Even though the d800 should have the NEX-7 beat in this, I actually like the NEX-7 image better.

To be fair they aren't the same image.    I shot at different times of day (and on different days) and didn't stand in exactly the same spot.   I used the 14mm zoom level on the Nikkor and the wider 10mm zoom level on the Sony.    

All sorts of full-frame vs cropped sensor math that would put you and me both asleep could go here.

But at the end of the day, here's what I ended up with.     I spent my vacation with a smaller camera.   It was lighter, wasn't as intrusive.  I took about 5,000 shots with the Sony and around 2,500 with the Nikon.    Both performed beautifully but the Sony edged up the Nikon in that, it was with me on a wrist strap, at places I dared not tread with the huge Nikon body / lens.

..and the results are very usable.  

The decision I've been weighing for awhile lately, is: Should I even still own a D800?   I love the camera and the lens, don't get me wrong.  But, if I could get (practically) the same results out of a camera that costs 1/3 the price and is 1/5 the size, Why wouldn't I?   Especially, being someone who generally doesn't profit from photography output.

This little experiment put me one step closer to not owning a big DSLR anymore.  Go ahead, talk some sense into me.

PS, My favorite compositional flavor of this shot is still last year's:

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Which was the D800 and a 28-300 zoom lens, multiple shots - stitched together as a panorama.