Images, not bikes

I don't have to travel for work very often (thankfully) and when I do it tends to be during the week and the days are full.  That means downtime is pretty rare - wake, breakfast, work, dinner, bed or fly home.  Which is kind of unfortunate.  If you're going to have to travel around occasionally on someone else's coin, it would be nice to at least see some of the local sites... 

So, when I found out last Thursday that I needed to be in Jessup MD at 7am on Saturday, I was not pleased about having to go out of town, but... if all went smooth on Saturday, I'd have nothing to do on Sunday.  Again, if you didn't figure it out from the first paragraph, I'm not the fan of travel that I once was.  I'd much rather be able to see stuff with the family or go somewhere to ride my bike.. but it's nice having a job too, so we do what we need to do.

As I've been dipping my toe a bit deeper into photography over the last couple of years, I've been more aware of trying to keep a camera with me.  This is especially true of whenever I've been travelling (never mind that like I said above, I usually don't have any time, or the fact that if I really wanted to create images I could do it out my front door...), I always take a camera with me.  Part of that 'carry the camera with you' idea, and partly because they've gotten so good of late, pushed me to get rid of all my cameras and consolidate to a micro 4/3 (MFT) camera.  Love it.  Small, versatile, good images, and fun to shoot.

I decided that, if I had a Sun off in Jesssup MD, I'd head about 30 minutes east and spend some time at the Annapolis City Dock.  All my previous memories have been fogged by 6+ days of sleep deprivation because of RAAM, but I seem to remember that it was a pretty cool place.  So, that's what I did on my one day off, out of town, no wife, no kids, no dog, had the bed all to myself... I got up at 5am to drive to Annapolis to take pictures of the sunrise (my wife thinks I'm crazy).

Got there just about the perfect time for the dawn, spent about 4 hours walking around.  Had coffee, watched the locals.  Had a crepe, more coffee, more locals... Checked out some exotics and muscle cars that showed up for a Sun morning meetup and generally just relaxed and enjoyed it.  Carried the MFT on a wrist strap, acted like a tourist, had a great time.  And, got out of there before all the real tourist showed up and clogged everything up.

I hadn't originally planned on doing anything with the images I took until I got back home on Thursday, but I had time Sunday afternoon and wanted to go ahead and push some out to G+.  But.. I shot them all in raw and had a loaner work laptop with no software on it.  Search was on for free raw editing software.  A few minutes on Google culled it down to Olympus Viewer 3, free download (if you have a valid Olympus S/N - I do), and pretty decent adjustment and develop tools.  By no stretch is it Lightroom, but it was free and got the job done that needed to be done.  I'm interested to compare these jpg's to edits out of Lightroom after I get home.

So... after all of that, if you're still reading, I hope you enjoy the images.