I visited Carmel-By-The Sea the other weekend (which I will refer to simply as “Carmel” hereafter). I’ve been meaning to visit the town since the good ol’ Instagram feed has been sending me travel reels1. The weekend I visited was much earlier in the month, and the weather was very nice. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty popular spot and it was very, very crowded, so I didn’t really get too many good photos.
I think if I ever go back to Carmel, I will instead visit the Mission Church, and hope it has less tourists. My interests are usually in scenery and nature, and it’s just hard to capture moments where there’s people and cars everywhere.
For this trip, I took my trusty Sony ZV-E10 paired with my 20mm lens. The AF lens worked better with my Cokin filter setup for quick shots around so many people2. Most photos were taken with the Sunsoft filter.
My main goal for the visit was actually for the kitschy houses in Carmel, but I didn’t get too many of those shots. To capture the photos I would’ve wanted, I would have to risk stepping on to the road or somehow magicking all the parked cars out of frame.
I think my favorite shot is of this outdoor wall lamp on someone’s house.
The Sunsoft filter worked pretty well for all the shots, plus a polarizer filter, so I didn’t switch until the end, when I was ready to drive back. I tried center spot and pastel, but only the center spot (plus polarizer) turned out decently.
I took these Carmel photos right after I got my new Fujifilm camera (but before the AF lens arrived), so I wasn’t ready to take that out with only the heavy manual lens on a trip when I didn’t even know how it was going to fit in my sling. I’ll have photos from the new camera ready for the next post, when I took it out on a local hike last weekend.
Footnotes
- I normally hate Instagram Reels, but since their algorithm figured out I like travel posts, it started recommending influencer-style reels to me. most of it is junk, but sometimes it does give me useful trip ideas. ↩︎
- I know street photography is all the rage, and I do enjoy those types of photos, but I just can’t bring myself to take photographs of strangers walking by and trying to enjoy their day. I like the idea of capturing moments of everyday life—beauty in the mundane, so to speak—but I don’t enjoy the idea of invading other people’s privacy. I don’t want someone to take a picture of me, especially my face, in public, so I wouldn’t do that to someone else. All that to say, having so many people around discouraged me from taking my camera out too often. ↩︎
