Adventures Once Had

Happy Birthday America.

-Sandy Noto

Recently, I spent a bit of time looking through my photos from visiting Japan in 2018 and then comparing them to my more recent trip photos from 2023. While I haven’t made significant changes in my equipment or technical abilities, it’s interesting to notice that my approach to image composition has changed. All the images on the left are from this year and the ones on the right are from 2018.

-Sandy Noto

In 2021 and 2022, almost all of my travel was for work. I wanted to return to traveling for fun but couldn’t quite bring myself to sort out flights, hotels, and logistics for any ambitious trips. So I planned a long weekend trip to Savannah. Kept everything very simple, loose, and easy. Flights between Chicago and Savannah are direct. We stayed at The Drayton Hotel, which was close enough to everything that we walked the entire weekend. For dinner, we went to The Grey and Brochu’s Family Tradition. Savannah is pretty small and a bit sleepy but the trip did the trick for reminding me why I like to travel for fun. After the trip, I finally found the oomph to get flights to Japan sorted out.

-Sandy Noto

Years ago, Eli and I went to Turkey for Thanksgiving. We may head back to Turkey later this year, and we were trying to remember all the places we stayed and the things we did. Specifically, we really wanted to recall this lovely hotel we stayed in during our Istanbul leg. I had a vague memory that I had posted about it here. Yesterday, when I found the image here from that hotel, I only wrote “ Istanbul ” in the caption.“ So unhelpful! I was hilariously exasperated with my past self. Thankfully, Eli has used TripIt (an extremely useful travel app) for years. The hotel we particularly loved in Istanbul has changed hands but still looks the same. It’s The Bank Hotel Istanbul. When I was younger, I was always thinking about the next trip so I did a terrible job of synthesizing and organizing after each trip. Perhaps I’ll be better about it now that I’m older and a tiny bit wiser.

-Sandy Noto

This week I was working on a video project. I shot the entire thing on my iPhone. It’s wild that just 10 years ago that would be unthinkable. I wanted to compare the iPhone 4k quality to my camera 4k video and it’s definitely not terrible. This was a quick clip I shot on my iPhone and it’s better quality than the stuff I was creating from my camera just a few years ago.

-Sandy Noto

Eli and I finally made it back to Japan! We meandered all over Tokyo. Here are a few of the quieter moments we stumbled across.

-Sandy Noto

Cuba ended up being my first international trip since Covid. It was entirely unintentional. There was a canceled trip to Mexico due to a hurricane and lots of hemming and hawing about trying to get back to Asia (but then deciding not to because of the complicated quarantine rules). I’m hoping this is the first of many more trips now that things are becoming easier again.

-Sandy Noto

Walked 30,000 steps in NYC today.

-Sandy Noto

Now that I’m back to working as a freelance photographer, I’m cleaning up my photo archives. My photo organization is a bit haphazard. I have a lot of external hard drives with all the photos I’ve taken over the years, which probably adds up to about 150 - 200k images. Then I keep my favorite and most recent images in Lightroom CC so I can access them anytime. That generally works pretty well, but I’ve gotten a bit lazy at culling the last 2 or 3 years, and so that library expanded to 30k. I’m trying to cut it down and am mostly working to clean out redundant, blurry and bracketed shots.

This set from Iceland caught my eye. I made a version of this timelapse after the trip to Iceland in 2015 but the Tumblr GIF support was really limited back then. I think the original was about 500px wide. This version is about double the size.

The Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon in Iceland was by far one of my favorite parts of the trip. We went because there was a crazy flight sale at the time. Unfortunately, I hadn’t paid much attention to the cost of food and gas in Iceland, so while getting there was very inexpensive, the trip itself was quite pricey. I got commissioned for some photo work for MasterCard at the time of the trip and was able to somewhat morph it into a half vacation, half work trip. Somehow it all worked out.

-Sandy Noto