October 9, 2017

The First Hike

On October 9, 2015, I took delivery of my current camera, the Samsung NX500. I decided to take a hike up in Griffith Park to “break it in” and hike a part of the park I’d not been to before. The hike began at the Old Zoo which was all decked out for evening hay rides for Halloween. The Old Zoo was actually the LA zoo’s second location, the first being in east LA’s Lincoln Park before moving to Griffith Park in the 1920’s and moving from this location to it’s current location about a half mile north in the 1960’s. The hike route went a north and west up the hill to Vista Del Valle Drive(a road that’s been closed to traffic since the early 90’s) and up a short but steep trail(affectionally known as “Cardiac Hill”) to the trail that goes south to Mt. Hollywood. Then the route goes down the east side of Mt. Hollywood to Daunte’s View and down the single track trail down a ridge known as the “Hogback”(it looks like the back of a hog from Glendale). At the bottom of this trail is a bridge over a ravine and then the trail loops around Glendale Peak(it’s more of a hill) to the Helipad. Continuing east to make the short climb to Beacon Hill(they used to have a beacon up there to guide flyers to Glendale’s Grand Central Airport) which is the easternmost mountain in the Santa Monica range.

In addition to me getting a good workout, I really wanted to get a good idea what the camera could do so I kept it in “Manual” mode and manual focus. I think this is a really good way to adapt to a
new DLSR(or mirrorless) camera. The one thing that I failed to take into account with this approach(I was using the camera’s display to focus and set the exposure) is that I was wearing sunglasses and every exposure came out a bit overexposed. Fortunately I was shooting in RAW so it wasn’t a major problem to correct this in Lightroom.