The malls are empty

 I’ve been picking up accessories for my new Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max this past week.  I’ve gone to one of the larger malls located in the west end of Ottawa this past week.  The mall is 90% empty.  There is maybe 10% of the people that are typically there.  It’s still a few weeks before Christmas but this particular mall and all the other malls in Ottawa are typically full of people.  But this year, all the malls are void of people.  You had a few thousand people in the malls at this time last year.  This year, it’s less than a few hundred.  There is hardly anyone there.  I went to this particular mall around 3:30pm on a Wednesday and Thursday night and it’s empty.  No one is doing any in person shopping.  The Apple store located in this mall is pretty empty.  You have maybe 20 employees if that and you got people lining up outside because they have one or two people at a time.

The rona virus is making people miserable and mean.  I think this is another reason I want to get out of Ottawa and Canada actually.  They say Canadians are nice and all, but in fact they are the complete and total opposite.  Just mean, grumpy a-holes for the most part.

On a brighter note, the above shot was taken with my new Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max with the ultra wide lens.  For me now, there is no point in carrying around my Canon PowerShot G7X Mark III or my Sony a7R Mark II.  I don’t think I’ll be using my camcorders either.  Next week, I’ll have more time after work to do some more photography and testing out the new iPhone for photography and videography.  I fortunately have the last two weeks of December off because the department is really slow and there aren’t that many people at work anyways.  Actually there aren’t any people in my building at work at all.  There are more security and cleaning staff than actual government employees.  

My fiancee and I are going to the Greater Toronto Area during Christmas to visit my fiancees sister.  So the iPhone 12 Pro Max (512GB storage edition) will be coming with me.  I think we’ll be hanging around Niagara Falls and the downtown core.  I’ll take my Sony a7R Mark II with me just in case.  It’s still a good camera for night time photography because of the full frame sensor.  We shall see.

My favourite camera. And why.

As a photographer, I've gone through a myriad of camera bodies and lenses.  Point and shoot cameras, cropped sensor cameras and full frame cameras.  Then there are the lenses.  Zoom and fixed focal lengths,  I can't count the number of bodies I've gone through in the past 15 years or so.  But the Sony a7R II body with its 42.4 megapixel full frame sensor has to be the best camera I've ever used.  The Sony f3.5-6.3 24-240MM lens is the most versatile lens I've ever owned.  It's no f2.8 70-200MM lens but I don't need the 16-35 or the 70-200 and another body to carry around.  

As I get progressively older, I do not want to carry around multiple bodies and lenses.  Like I've stated in the past, when I was in the Rockies, I carried around 3 lens, 3 bodies and a camcorder.  That was a pain the butt I can tell you.   I also switched to the Sony RX100 Mark VII which was an amazingly fantastic little pocket camera.  But I needed something a bit more versatile.  The Sony a7R II combined with the Sony f3.5-6.3 24-240MM is just the right combination for a one man run and gun setup.

I was hoping I'd be moving out west to Calgary in the next couple of weeks but it looks like that is going to be put on hold.  With the corona virus, SSC is not bringing us on past March 31st of this year which sucks.  Photo sales are not picking up and I think things will get only worse before they get any better.

I am hoping at some point this year, we will make out west.  I want to do a lot more landscape photography with the Sony a7R II and the Sony f3.5-6.3 24-240MM lens.  On a side note, iPad OS 13.4 came out today and it has made the iPad a little worse for wear.  The Files app is a huge disappointment   It now crashes whenever I try to copy over the 85 megabyte files from the Sony a7R II.  I am stuck using my Windows 10 laptop.  I'm thinking that I will try the 2018 Apple iPad Pro tomorrow again after the system settles down a bit.  In the meantime, I'll be using the Windows 10 laptop and Affinity Photo 1.8.2 to edit the photos.

More photography with the Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max

I was still going into work last week when I got this photo of an ambulance picking up a patient in downtown Ottawa.  How things have changed in a week.  I’m off of work indefinitely.  Thankfully I have my Sony a7R II and my Sony f3.5-6.3 24-240MM lens.  I also have my Apple iPhone Pro Max.  My two favourite cameras to date.  I’m doing conference calls at certain points of the week and doing photography after.  One of my accounts at SSC is not set up properly so I cannot login via VPN.  Hopefully tomorrow it’ll be fixed.  I may actually go into work a few times next week just to check on emails and such.  I went today and there was actually one person working.

This Coronavirus thing just means I get to do more photography.  I distance myself from people when I see someone walking towards me.  I pretty much do my photography outside of the city.  I’ve over shot stuff in Ottawa so I’m looking to do new things.  If you have any ideas, let me know.

Coronavirus

This is not a pandemic.  It's a panic.  It's a bad flue people.  More people die from the regular flu than will die of this corona virus.  The governments and mainstream media of the world are just causing this pandemic.  Go out and live your life.  Wash your hands and sneeze into your arm.  Don't be stupid about this.