2024 Southwest Trip - Days 1 & 2

Gallery (55 images): 2024 Southwest Trip - Days 1 & 2

This gallery has images from the first two days of photography during my first Southwestern US trip with my wife Emily in April of 2024. There are some days where I took no photos due to lots of driving, so in this case day 2 is not the next day, but the day after next. I published a "trip highlights" blog post in May of 2024 which details the route we took, and that can be seen here...

http://www.mikemander.com/2024/05/2024-southwest-trip-highlights.html

On this trip, Fujifilm Canada was kind enough to lend me a demo X-T5 body, so my X-Pro2 acted as a backup on the trip. It was fantastic having a camera with in-body image-stabilization (IBIS) especially for our tour of Alcatraz (next blog post!), and also having a 40 megapixel sensor for landscape detail was great as well. As of August of 2025, I now have my own 40MP, IBIS equipped Fujifilm camera, the very compact X-E5, which is a fantastic camera too. So after two years, I am now finally starting to post some daily trip galleries (like this one) with more detail about all the places we visited. Since Emily and I no longer live in BC (we moved to Ottawa, Ontario as I'm sure you've noticed, based on my recent blog posts), we are unfortunately no longer able to do any easy Southwest road trips. Working on images from previous trips will then be my way of experiencing and reliving the wonderful deserts of California, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, as well as the high deserts of Oregon, all of which I greatly miss already!

On this 2024 road trip, Emily and I drove through Washington and Oregon, basically non-stop, and the first place we took some time to explore was Stout Grove in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, situated in northern California. We didn't have as much time as we had hoped, which was my fault: I accidentally forgot to pack Emily's sun hat and we decided to detour to an REI for some shopping in southern Oregon. The detour and time spent at the REI was longer that we had anticipated, and since we had booked a hotel in San Francisco with the plan of staying there for three days, we only had limited time on the drive south. The second part of the gallery has shots from San Francisco...

On our first day there, we walked from our hotel near Chinatown to the very scenic Fisherman's Wharf area, and spent the day sightseeing, visiting a few places of interest. Photos 18 to 20 show the large number of sea lions that frequent the harbour, sunning themselves on the docks. We went up on a huge Ferris wheel with enclosed cabins (thankfully since there was a very cold wind that day) and photos 29 to 32 were from up high, although the city views are a touch blurry due to being shot through less than clean glass. Photo 28 shows the ferris wheel in the distance. Next was a weird and wonderful museum of antique mechanical "arcade" machines, The Musée Mécanique, shown in photos 35 through 43 in the gallery. We also walked to the famous Ghirardelli chocolate factory, photos 47 to 51, which was founded way back in 1852.

The last photo in the gallery shows the famous steep stretch of Lombard Street from below, said to be one of the crookedest streets in America with eight tight hairpin turns in only one block! You can see all the cars backed up and descending down the hill.

Read: All the blog postings from my 2024 Southwest Trip

2026 - Ottawa Winderlude & Chinatown

Gallery (40 images): 2026 - Ottawa Winterlude & Chinatown

In early February, Emily and I walked over to Confederation Park one evening to view the "Winterlude" festival ice sculpture displays. Many were lit with bright, coloured LED spotlights, however a few were dark, so Emily shone one of my flashlights at those to light up the ice while I took photos, like the Artemis 2 sculpture for example. These photos were all handheld, no tripod, and once again made me very glad I am now shooting a Fujifilm X-E5 with its effective in-body image-stabilization (IBIS), since that helped me keep my ISO down to 400 or less, despite it being fully dark out.

Then, in late February, Emily and I decided to go for a chilly 10km round-trip walk to Ottawa's Chinatown where we found a very nice cupcake bakery called Thimble Bakery, where I had a fantastic Black Forest cupcake! During our walk, we actually came across a real live working phone booth, photo 35 in the gallery. We also went as far as the outskirts of Ottawa's "Little Italy" district, which seems to border on Chinatown. Later that evening went for some excellent Chinese food in a local restaurant and then walked back home. 

Website is up on new servers...

My new server for www.sublimephoto.com has been up and running for a few days now, and I've gone through and fixed all the links to galleries and embedded images that were missing and not working on my blog pages. If you see any blank images, just hit reload and they should load. I see I started the blog in June of 2010, so getting close to 16 years already! I still need to go through all the galleries and links on my website, to be sure they are all working, but the vast majority (if not all) should be fine now.

Possible downtime...

I will be transitioning to a new domain host in the near future and in the interim, it could be that my image galleries will either load slowly, or possibly not at all. In addition, the headline images for the posts in this blog may also not show properly. My previous domain host was bought up twice, most recently by Network Solutions, and I suddenly received notification that a huge charge for a three year renewal was attempted to be charged to my credit card. I never received any notification of an upcoming bill, nor could I even see on their domain hosting page how much the renewal was for, for what term it was and what services were being renewed.

After a very frustrating few hours in a support chat, I was promised a reduced rate for a one year renewal, which was still substantially higher than I could get from a different domain host. After I grudgingly agreed to that charge, despite the fact that they refused to send me an email detailing the charge and the subsequent renewal price after the promised year, they charged my credit card. I then received the confirmation in the mail that said the charge was for only one month of renewal and not one year as promised - WTF! They apologized for the confusion but refused to do anything further about it, so I asked to be refunded. My website (www.sublimephoto.com) still works for now, and so do the galleries in this blog that are hosted on my site, but perhaps not for long...

So... I am now in the process of signing up with a different domain host and laboriously uploading all of my content again. What a massive pain since I have about 25GB worth of image galleries online. In any case, I absolutely DO NOT recommend Network Solutions as a domain host. Their account pages provide almost no detailed info and either the billing support person I spoke to was, at best, terribly incompetent or at worst, guilty of trying to scam me into paying for one month of service at the price of a promised year of service. What an annoying way to start a Sunday morning!