Tomorrow we’ll be flying back to China, and on our last day in the Bay Area, I took Elena to Monterey and Carmel. We didn’t take the 17 Mile drive because we were on a tight schedule, and I knew Elena would want to walk around the beach and see all the cute little shops. Monterey is really nothing to write home about, while Carmel on the other hand is a lot prettier. Next time, we ought to stay the night at one of the cozy little bed & breakfast places. Here are some of the photos I took while walking around:
Elena took her share of photos of Monterey and Carmel with the Fuji F10. You can see them here.
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For dinner, we met up with my old buddy Emory, his current girlfriend Sue, my old roomate Jason Felix, and my brother Dennis and his wife Liz at Broadway Prime in Burlingame. Em told me that when the owners of Broadway Prime left House of Prime Ribs in San Francisco to start up their own restaurant, they were sued by House of Prime Ribs and the case was settled out of court for 1.5 million dollars, which Broadway Prime made back in a year. I don’t know if that’s considered a huge success, but I know plenty of restaurants that don’t come near that number.
During dinner, Jason told us the hilarious story of his horrible experience of being a witness to a crime, and then having to testify in court. Anyone who knows Jason Felix knows how animated and funny he is when telling a story–he had us in stitches the whole time. Afterwards we went to Emory’s office/warehouse and played with his airsoft guns and action figures. God I miss playing airsoft! After we move back to the States, I’ll totally get back into playing again.
It’s hard to decide whether to use a SLR or a compact when shooting situations like above. A SLR would need to be stopped down a lot to get everyone in focus, but then you’d need insanely long exposure time to capture the ambient lighting, and that’s just not possible when shooting groups of people (and you could only use small amount of flash or you’ll kill the ambient lighting). A compact point & shoot would have vast depth of field even when at its widest aperature, but the image quality simply cannot match the SLR, and the on-camera flash of the P&S cameras are just atrocious. (Canon 1D MKII on the left, Fuji F10 on the right.)
