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What is the Best Camera for Travelers?
That is the question I’m asking myself this morning after my existing camera tumbled to a watery grave over the weekend. The above photograph is the last one my poor Sony NEX-7 will ever take.
Over the last four years of travel I’ve taken a bit of a round trip in terms of camera technology. I started out with a creaky old Lumix point-and-shoot that simply wasn’t up to the task. After a couple of months I traded up to an entry level Nikon DSLR. That camera is responsible for most of the images appearing on this blog.
The Nikon was a great camera to shoot with but somewhat less of a joy to carry. The burden wasn’t terrible when we traveled by car, but once we traded in our wheels for backpacks the size and weight of a big camera became more than I really wanted to bear. So late last year I downsized my DSLR to one of the new mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras.
After spending a considerable amount of money on my new camera kit, it didn’t totally blow me away. The image quality was about the same as the camera I had given up. And while the body of the NEX-7 is smaller than that of my old DSLR, it’s not exactly tiny once you add some lenses to the equation. I still ended up filling my old DSLR bag with the NEX 7, an 18-200 MM zoom lens and a 10-18 MM wide angle lens.
Now that I’m forced back into the camera market, I’ve started to wonder whether it’s time to regress back to a point and shoot.
Google’s Overambitious Anonymizer
Hoisted from Google Street View, this is exactly the kind of thing I’d have done as a bored 20-something programmer tasked with writing an algorithm to blur out all the faces and phone numbers that inevitably get scooped up by Google’s camera car as it photographs every inch of the world. And thus, the rise of the Feline Privacy Movement is born.
The Fulltime Travel Weight Loss Miracle
Call it the Tapas and Wine Diet. Or maybe it’s the Stewed Chicken, Rice and Beer Diet. Whatever you call it, whenever we’ve put on backpacks to travel, we always lose weight.
Spain, the legendary land of salted pork, dark red wine, and deep fried tapas was no exception. After a month of traveling around Spain, Shannon and I both lost a noticeable amount of weight – somewhere between five and ten pounds each. We did it without trying. We did it without necessarily needing to. It’s just something that happens with this lifestyle. Maybe we should just call it a side benefit of living well.
In a previous post we discussed why fulltime travel is cheaper than staying at home. Now we’re going to explain why it’s better for your waistline too.
The Roman Bridge of Cordoba
Constructed early in the 1st century B.C. Cordoba’s Roman bridge still spans the Guadalquivir River.
Cordoba Highlights: A Mosque-Cathedral and a Microbrewery
To the victor go the spoils…and the right to re-decorate.
In the site where Cordoba’s Mezquita now stands there was once a Roman temple, then a Visigothic cathedral and then a mosque. Rather than re-do the entire edifice in the 13th century when Christian crusaders took over the town, they left the majority of the mosque intact but made a significant alteration. They constructed a Catholic church in its center.
Everywhere Once 