AmazoniaBike | TravelBlog

1: Travel light, but travel prepared.
There is nothing worse than having too much heavy equipment to lug around and it can often get in the way and make you stand out, but worse than that is not having the equipment you need. For city shooting, carry around a wide to medium zoom for a variety of conditions, and if out shooting landscapes, a light tripod is invaluable.

2: Use your camera’s P mode.
Shooting in AV, TV or Manual modes gives you the greatest deal of control and any decent photographer will rarely use anything else, however if wandering around a city, use P mode. This sets the camera to Auto for ISO, shutter speed and aperture whilst allowing you to change any settings if necessary and giving control over the flash, and when a shot comes along and you have no time to think, all you need to do is compose the shot and shoot. Better to give control to the camera than to miss the shot completely, and if you find you have longer than you thought you can flick back to one of the other modes for more shots.

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Sea turtles are very intelligent creatures of nature; they continue coming to Puerto Vallarta regardless of the swine flu scare, the border town drug wars, or the global recession! They don’t visit Vallarta for its perfect climate, its eight beautiful golf courses, its world class deep sea fishing, its hundreds of fine restaurants, nightclubs and discotheques, its magnificent sunsets, or the colorful tropical flora and fauna in the surrounding Sierra Madre hillsides; they visit Vallarta strictly for its 35 miles of sandy beaches. However, the fact that they love the beaches around PV is only a small clue as to what makes the sea turtles so incredibly intelligent.

Sea turtles constitute a single radiation that was distinct from all other turtles during the Late Cretaceous Period, the “age of dinosaurs”, at least 100 million years ago. It’s hard to imagine that approximately 65 million years ago during the Cretaceous–Tertiary Extinction Event (KT Mass Extinction), the planet endured catastrophic events such as massive asteroid impacts and/or tremendous volcanic activity resulting in significant climate changes affecting all of the Earth’s plant and animal life. Sea turtles were among the few species to survive these traumatic events and related climate changes.

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