Guns, Cameras, Food, and State Parks 3

After leisurely making our way back from East County, we decided to hit up Torrey Pines State Park. A short 10-15min drive away from our apartment, just north of the UCSD campus, lies the home of the endangered species of trees. A sunset hike doubled as test photo session for the Olympus OM-D E-M5 micro four thirds camera that arrived in the mail the day before.

Living in San Diego, we sometimes take for granted of what the city has to offer. We forget that while to us, this is simply where we study and work and toil away our youth, that this is also frequently the vacation destination of countless others. And then we remind ourselves to be grateful that we live in such a blessed place.

Torrey Pines is both a popular tourist destination and a local favorite. The state park with its sandy bluffs has multiple hiking trails, with at least one leading directly down to the beach below.

The hills that make up these cliffs are sandy and prone to slipes and landslides on occasions.

Interestingly, that makes for some very unique geological formations on the sides of the cliffs.

From the top of the cliffs, the beach and the ocean is right below.

We do live in a nice place, dammit! Need to be more grateful that the natural beauties are readily accessible, even if we don't get many chances to acces them...

Taking the beach trail eventually leads to the beach (duh!), and what an entrance it is.

The side of the fragile cliffs had two interesting holes on the sides. I wonder what they are...

There's this little rock formation at a point on the beach where the cliffs juts out a bit, leaving a channel that's exposed during low tide. When we go there around sun down, the tides were came in fast, and we unfortunately did not make it onto that platform.

We walked on the beach back to our car, making a sort of loop. As we walked, golden hour rays showered the beach and lit the beach magically.

A word on Olympus OM-D E-M5:
The photos from these series of posts are taken on two different cameras: the OM-D and my Canon Rebel T2i. Some of the images taken on the OM-D has been cropped to the 35mm ratio. Can you figure out which one is taken by which?

All in all, I'm very happy with the OM-D with the 12-50mm f3.5-6.3 zuiko lens. While the small aperture can be limiting in certain situations, it is fast and reliable. Not to mention it takes some stunning landscape pictures. The body itself is very lightweight, compared to bigger DSLRs, and very portable, although the 12-50mm lens adds a good amount of bulk and weight. Some downside though, are that being fully digital, the viewfinder goes to "sleep" the same way the display does, so although it is fully capable of taking random snaps, raising the viewfinder to your eye to capture a moment while the display is sleeping means you don't know what exactly is in the frame when you press the button. Also, being an avid Lighroom user (which is why it takes me so long to publish photos since I spend hours and hours editing them), the compatibility isn't great. At least, it isn't what it is for my Canon. Another bummer. But I imagine as MFT cameras become more and more common, compatibility issues will be less common. In the mean time, while the $1299 I paid for the camera when I ordered it from Amazon was worth it, it did hurt my wallet... It also means I may or may not be able to get another lens for my Canon by the time I need to go to Hawaii. Hmm... things to think about.