Winter Holiday Trip

In the past I haven’t done much for winter holidays. This is mostly due to my many years of working in retail. If you haven’t worked in retail, the holiday season, November and December, account for 50% of your sales. This year I decided to change this and break the cycle by going on an adventure! Me and my girlfriend headed down to Los Angeles and San Francisco for our holidays. It was an interesting trip with a lot of walking, average of 10kms (6 miles) a day. The photos that came out of my trip didn’t end up being some of my best work but I will showcase about 10 of my best pictures at the bottom of the post. I am always looking for more engagement on posts so if you have questions or are looking for recommendations for either San Francisco or Los Angeles please comment!

The biggest 3 things I took away from this trip were (this may be updated later on as I am still in the process of decompressing from the trip and bringing myself back to reality);

Zoom lenses are a must for walking around in urban landscapes. I have recently switched to almost fully using prime lenses. As amazing as using primes is, I found there was times when I just couldn’t get the shot I wanted. This inability was due to not being able to stand in certain places because of traffic and people as well as people and traffic being in the way of the shot which I have struggled with cropping out in post processing where as if I could have zoomed in I would have been able to compose a better image right on the camera. The only time the primes shined were during night time but its a city so it is very well lit and I believe I would have been fine bumping up from my 1.8 to a 2.8 and wouldn’t have noticed the difference.
Transit, in my past I have taken Vancouver (YVR) transit for granted. After spending time in Los Angeles, I can not even believe how superior Vancouver transit is in comparison to LA. Every time we went somewhere for an hour or two, the transit to the destination was about the same. Now they do have Uber and Lyft but that ended up getting quite expensive to do for everything. Also small addition, Lyft is infinitely better than Uber so a massive shoutout to those guys!! Another thing with transit was in San Francisco we arrived Sunday morning and the train was not operating at 6 a.m, what is that about?!?!
Overnight Travel, so 5 days in LA then 5 days in SF. The 5 days in SF ended up being more like 4 days due to an overnight bus ride from hell. We took a bolt bus for an overnight bus trip and ended up not really sleeping as much as we had hoped and slept till 4 or 5 the following day which ended up making it effectively a waste of a day. The bus driver drove super erratically and there was many bumps as well as most of the bus stayed up through the night talking? I plan for the future to no longer take any red eye flights or over night bus rides, to hard on my circadian rhythm!