Last time I talked gear and planned on talking about what I learned from my beach scouting session, but the day has come and gone and I want to get my initial thoughts down quick and clean. Afterwards, I have up until November 21st to post process before submitting images. That'll give me time to do things right and give the images a proper update.

Good News - I actually went through with the event. That's one notch on my belt.

Bad News - It didn't go perfect. (Hey, I can dream!)

Good - I think that moves me up from "just some dude with a camera" to an enthusiast photographer. (Not "Guy with Camera" which means something totally different.)

Bad - There were a lot more photographers volunteering than I expected.

Good - It took pressure off of me and I got assigned as a Floater, which meant I could do anything I wanted.

Bad - I rented a 55-250mm IS STM lens, and while I liked it, I needed some wider shots for the event.

Good - I brought my 18-135mm IS STM lens and it performed beautifully.

Kind of Bad - I forgot to bring the lens hood, but it was no big deal really.

Really Bad - My less than a week old Canon polarizer lens fell off at some point, and that's $200 gone just like that.

Just so Really, Really Bad - It really took away some of the fun from the event. I could not stop thinking about it. Still thinking about it right now. The worst part is not knowing when and where it came off. How can I learn to not do that next time when I don't know what went wrong? Bad images I can learn from. This I don't know how to learn from it, and I don't know that I'm going to buy a replacement. I really need to see some comparisons between the official Canon brand versus the nearly ten times cheaper 3rd party brands.

Back to normal Bad - My battery died.

Good - It died at 3:15pm with the event ending at 4pm, so it wasn't that big of a deal, especially since I was a floater.

Also Good - I filled up my memory card the day before so I was able to go to the event with plenty of space.

Fantastically Good - I love the Manfrotto Befree tripod I bought. It performed like I wanted it to.

Bad - I couldn't figure out how to use the 600EX-RT flash I bought. It would just overexpose things so I put it away.

Also Bad - The sun during judging time was pretty much in the worst place it could have been, creating all kinds of shadows in places I didn't want it to be. If I had known how to use my flash properly as a fill light, that would have helped immensely.

Good - Overall it was a good experience that taught me a lot. I'll go again next year if I can, with a better understanding of the event, and new skills to bring to the table.

Also Good - The work isn't over yet. I went and bought Photoshop CS6 so I could qualify for Adobe's Photography bundle. So now I have Photoshop CC, and Lightroom back at my disposal, so now it's time to learn a whole lot more and see what kind of images I can produce. I'll have some actual images to share next Sandcastle update.

(In the mean time, I'll also be attempting to shoot a very special Make-a-Wish event that's happening November 15th, where they are going to turn San Francisco into Gotham City to make a kid's wish to become Batman come true.)