Day 1 — In Which We Slack

The first day here in Oax­aca is always a lit­tle slow.  I’ve been beaten up by the air­lines, the alti­tude change is more than 5000 ft, and there’s the nec­es­sary trips for sup­plies (beer.) Lead­ing to not doing much.

A brief after­noon stroll to try out the new lens was all the ambi­tion I could muster.

We first stopped at the church of Soledad. One of my favorite landmarks.

a stormy look­ing sky, but it didn’t rain

Then turned around on looked up the street and made a cou­ple of test shots of the new 12-24mm and the kit lens (18-150mm) that I’ve been using for the last two years.

With the old kit lens — which is still my go-to lens for any­thing that doesn’t require big zoom. Get­ting the wide shot here pushes the lens a lit­tle too far.

every­thing bends a lit­tle at the edges.

But the new lens takes this sort of back-against-the-wall and hope it all fits in the frame stuff in stride.

that’s bet­ter, the walls are straight.

A few blocks later it allowed me to cap­ture this novel screeen with­out hav­ing to shot at an angle. Those bright bits are the mesh shop­ping bags that you see by the dozens in the mar­kets every day.

pretty sub­stitue for tarps

Sun­day is a slow day here. A few hours later the Zocolo will be packed with strolling fam­i­lies and the local band, but this early in the after­noon there’s just not much happening.

slow sun­day

Though a hint of the evening’s crowds is here in this lineup of ham­burger and hot dog carts on their way to the cen­ter of the town.

the ham­burger and hot dog carts mov­ing toward the zocolo

I spent my time play­ing with a new lens — but Jim was work­ing hard and got some great images. You can see them on his own blog — obser­va­tions. Ignore the chimp­ing pho­tog­ra­pher. le sigh.