mr.jdm

I'm sure your pics wouldnt be so nice if you didn't have that special touch as a photographer. Photoshop and Lightroom are just a second complement to your pics look more beautiful and professional, but the major work was done before :p

 

I could follow your advice and bring my macro lens but I guess it would be kinda difficult to me bringing for dinner a big-sizzed camera to photograph my dishes :o if it fit on my pocket or purse :D ...

 

I am willing to buy a wide lens as I need faster apertures and something that gives me stability in poor light conditions. Still wondering which one to buy ... :confused:

 

Anyway, fantastic report and pics, I can't wait to start my vacations and my cruise :rolleyes:

Yes creating and composing the shot takes alot of time as well. Special with the caribbean heat, you just want to take a quick shot and go. Nightshots can be very tricky too.

I brought my slr camera everywhere dinner time, lunch,snacks haha. Sure we've had a table beside us wondering why we take pictures of every single bit.. but who cares. ahhah i think your macro lens will do fine for food pictures. Im not to sure how fast the lens is..

If your looking for a wide angle lens. my suggestion Tokina 11-16 2.8 or Sigma 10-20 3.5 or Canon 10-22 but canon will result more of lens flare and might be a tad slower for night shot.. for oasis class ship i think wide angle works the best.

anyways i think our hal southern caribbean trip is no go.... freedom of the seas is looking alot better for pricing plus the added crown and anchor savings certificate..

at home.. hahah just a little iffy booking so soon. its not even a month since we got off the oasis and majesty and of course $$$$ situation. hahaha

We really wanted to go to Half Moon cay.. so we are 90% booking Hal Westerdam southern caribbean. VA aft balcony :)

aha...photoshop...answers my question...which program you used. did the color saturation (forgot the actual term) pics come from your camera settting or editing??? LOVE you pics !!!

 

I can't wait to be on this ship...thank you for the great review:cool:

Im actually using a few programs. Photoshop CS5, Photoshop lightroom and photomatix. The pics are mainly to create the shot and exposure you want, shooting in raw format will usually result in very dull pictures. That is when photoshop comes in handy. Adjust the colors,tones, saturations etc in photoshop. I dont know how my camera is when shooting automatic mode and in jpeg format. Ever since i bought my camera. Its always been RAW format and shoot in manual setting or aperature setting or shutterspeed ( patients and practice,which is hard at times when your in a rush.)

Thank you everyone for the warm comments. We are in the process of making a deposit for another caribbean cruise:D:D.. sadly its not going to be RCI...

Gosh this is awesome! We're on the Oasis this Saturday and through your review we're getting the lowdown on the what to and what not to do's! Many thanks!

 

BTW, as I posted on your Majesty review, your pictures are incredible! RC should hire you to be a photographer.

 

One question: for the bus ride to the mall in Falmoputh, how often did the bus make the trip? We love to explore like you did (and I love jerk chicken) but want to plan it out. thanks again.

You must be getting really excited for Saturday...not too long now!

I believe buses ran every 30minutes. When you get off the ship, turn left towards the artisan market. Walk past the marketing and that is where the buses to Rose Hall are. There's jerk chicken in The Shoppes at Rose Hall and also at the port. We liked the ones at Rose Hall better. Hope this helps.

Thank you everyone for the positive feedback and for those cruising soon, have an awesome time!

Good review! Phenomenal pictures too! Your review has rekindled a lot of positive memories of our Oasis cruise. I also live in GVA. Did you watch any Canucks games during your cruises?

We only watched highlights in the news. They showed nba games instead.

What a disappointment last night but they must be setting it up to win the cup at home:D

thanks for your reply :)

 

didnt that give you a lot of trouble to convert all pics from raw to jpeg ? :confused:

 

Now, I know how you made 32gb of pics!! :D

 

i dont think i have enough storage .. humm let me see, 1 SD card of 4gb, 1 of 8gb ... would that be enough? :p

We bought extra memory cards before sailing and I'm glad we did. We would have ran out. No trouble at all in converting, it just took awhile.

Thank you for the wonderful review and photos. I'm looking so forward to our upcoming cruise on Oasis, as well as you've inspired me to take better photos this time around!

Thank you for reading and have a great time on your cruise. So happy I've actually inspired someone hehe

Well that review and the pictures were mesmerizing! I spent some time here at work reading thru it all :p Ok...where is the special spot on deck 11 to watch the water show from? Please!! LOL:D

Go all the way to back you will see a glass door few loungers there. One side of the ship is smoking the other side is not. I think it was Portside. Also deck 13 :)

Did you go to the Seafood Shack? On another thread, someone said that it was supposed to change to Rita's Cantina, the Mexican eating place that is on Allure. Have you heard anything about this, and, if so, when this will take place?

No that was the only restaurant that did not interest our stomachs :) Seafood Shack is now ala carte pricing like Izumi's.

my wife and I are headed for the Oasis in Sept. After seeing all the great pics you took, I feel like I almost don't have to go! :) I can't say I'm an avid photographer, but I'll try to take some as well with my Nikon DSLR. And I'm sure my skills are no where near yours. But it's all fun!

 

BTW, are you a car guy and particularly fond of JDM cars?

Yes JDM cars. I see you have yourself a e46... nice ride!

Beleive me i came back with 32gb pics for Oasis. took awhile to do the review since i had to post process my pictures. Shot in RAW format. edited it in photoshop then coverted to jpg file. Some of the pics i took were 3 pictures 3 different exposures then merged into 1 picture. That way it brought out all the highlights and shadows of the picture. Some were blurry since it was windy up in the pool deck at times. Specially the moon picture i beleive there was 15knt wind on the pool deck.

I enjoyed every pixel of your photos!! :D

 

I'm also a photograph addicter, have also a Canon like yours and a zoom lens 18-200mm which is not so sharp and wide like your lens. Also a macro-lens is joining my set, but of course it won't give me any chance if I take it to my cruise on August. So, I'll just take the zoom lens which Im sure will give me a nice range of all type of pics.

Hope I can get great colours like yours!! :p

Whichever lens you take, I'm quite certain you'll get great pictures. The ship is beautiful in itself. A macro lens would be great for food pictures. Just shoot raw and make your adjustments in photoshop. Have fun on your cruise in August!

great review and the pics are great, sitting here in UK, cold to-day, makes me want to book that cruise, keep them coming.....

We are on the same boat. I'm sitting here at work wishing I were back on the ship. I have no more pictures to post..until my next sailing :)

Thank you so much for your review. We were also on this cruise and were part of the Nachi group of 7. Dan & I really enjoyed meeting you and have very much loved seeing your pictures. They are way better than anything we took on the cruise! Take care and we hope your next cruise isn't too far in the future.

 

Gail & Dan

Hi Gail, i hope the two of you enjoyed the rest of the cruise as we didn't see the Nachi group around the ship at all. Regards to Dan.

Fantastic pics!! We will be on the Oasis in November for our Honeymoon, seeing your pics makes it very hard to wait another 159 days!! We are booked for Nachi, loved the pics. You didn't say much about it. Did you like Nachi??

Nachi was awesome. It was a nice change from being on the ship's pool deck. When you get there, they'll make you wear sombreros and they'll snap a picture which they'll try to sell while you're on the beach. We declined and they tried to sell it again to us for cheaper when we were about to leave.

We didn't go in the water because of the waves. We're not strong swimmers so we went in the pool instead. When we got there, nachi just opened so the pool still had leaves/bugs. Not a lot but you'll be able to see them.

Service was great. Our drinks kept coming even without us asking but they only put a tiny bit of alcohol in your drink. You won't be able to taste it. The food during lunch was quite tasty and filling. There were 7 of us and I don't think anyone finished their lunch. We all skipped dessert as well.

It was a relaxing day and you'll enjoy your time there provided you want to relax. 'Spring break' type of behavior isn't allowed at nachi.

Hello, first off an awesome review and the pic's are incredible!!!

I did notice in your pic's for your Chops dinner, it seems you had the newer menu. I am wondering was the mud pie no longer an option? I saw you had red velvet cake and that is not on the older menu? I did post the question elsewhere but have not gotten any response.

thank you in advance,

Patty

Yes, they added a few items in the menu. The Oysters and Red velvet wasn't in our previous sailing so we tried those. I believe a fish (salmon, i think) entree was added as well. I recall seeing the mud pie on the menu. Was that good? maybe I should try that on our next sailing :D

Thanks everyone. I'm glad all of you enjoyed viewing the pictures.

Going digital has been the greatest advance in photography for me. I sometimes will take twenty pictures of a senset and then delete most of them while keeping the "perfect" shots. It is so much better than the old film days when you would get home and develope the film only to fine that you don't have quite what you thought you had. At that point it is pretty hard to travel back several thousand miles to retake the shot!:D

We are the same. It took several shots to get the pictures we wanted. One time I was standing by the Central Park sign for more than 10 minutes trying to take a picture..it still came out blurry in the end haha.

I agree, I used to go through rolls of film to get the perfect shot... and you had to pay all the costs for developing the bad ones. With digital I took 1500 shots on my last 8 day cruise (6 cities) and ended up using about 500 of them.

We try to delete the not so good pictures from the camera right away to free up space. Sometimes even when pictures look good in your camera, they're still blurry once uploaded :(

We sailed Oasis in 2010, and one of our only complaints was the pizza at Sorrento's. But judging from your exceptional food pics, it looks like they've upgraded the pizza quality. This picture looks nothing like the dry, hard pizza we had, this looks great!!

 

Thanks for the great review and excellent pics!

I read about the pizza and cupcake being dry but they were fine when we went. We didn't go all the time though. We had cupcake once and pizza no more than 3x.

One last evening walk around the ship

All in all, we enjoyed our time on the Oasis. The ship is magnificent, innovative and just plain beautiful. We'd sail her again if the price is right but next time around, we would probably get an oceanview room or an oceanview balcony as we missed seeing the ocean. You'd have to go on higher decks in order to see the it.

I hope you all enjoyed the photos as much as we enjoyed taking them.

By the way, we stayed another day in Fort Lauderdale and watched the Oasis sailaway

Happy cruising everyone!!

Later that night, we went to the promenade deck for the farewell party.

The penguins from Madagascar. So cute!!

Shrek

Shrek and cruise director staff dancing

Full house

Thank you everyone!! you guys are far too kind.

Nanatopiper - A few days after getting back home, we started looking for our next sailing. You should definitely cruise again. It's quite addicting :D

tx_sweetpea - I'm glad you're enjoying the review so far.

oceanblue33 - Thank you.

Nancynurse - Have a wonderful time on your cruise. You must be excited. We started counting down 3 months before our sailing hehe

VegasChic - We are debating whether we should Allure next year or book another Oasis. We'll see. Have a fantastic time on your cruise!

debbie fewell - I don't mind at all. We've learned so much from everyone and we're just returning the favor.

dizzlepop - Have an awesome trip

lounger - Wow was the first word we said when we set foot on the ship. She really is beautiful.

Dizney - Have a safe trip and have a great time on your cruise.

That moon pic is fantastic!! Would you mind if I used it as my wallpaper?

Not at all. I'm glad you like the picture.

We then went to dinner in the MDR

More pictures from lunch

The nights show was Come Fly with Me. It was quite interesting but their props are just marvelous.

Thanks for your review! Love the photos; not usually big on food photos, but yours look like you work for Bon Appetite! The presentation of the food seems better than other RCI ships. Did you find the food better?

Keep the photos coming! Love it!

Thank you! you can probably tell we love to eat :)

They added a few items at Chops that wasn't in our previous sailing and as for mdr, I was told that the menu is the same fleet-wide so it should all be the same. There might be variance of taste depending on the executive chef.

Great review and even better pics! We'll be on the Eastern route in less than 2 weeks! :D

Have a fantastic time! I hope my pictures are getting you excited!!

Day 7 - At Sea

We went to Johnny Rockets for breakfast. It seemed like that is the only place that do not get too busy during breakfast.

We lounged around the pool deck and relaxed until lunch. We had lunch at the main dining room

A couple of Carnival ships docked that day

Off to Sorrentos we went to try out the pizza..yum!!

Cloud formation and the horizon that day looked so beautiful

A Carnival ship leaving port

More pictures from Nachi

After Nachi, we all took a taxi back together.

View from the ship

Day 6 - Cozumel

We booked Nachi Cocum prior to sailing. They only allow a certain number of people in each day and we were lucky to be able to book as there were carnival ships in port that day.

Nachi was $49 and included snack, lunch and alcohol. We rounded up people from our roll call to share a cab with and we saved a few dollars doing that. I also felt safer going there with other passenger from the ship as oppose to just us two going on our own.

a couple more pictures from the street party

Richard Spacey as Austin Powers. We caught him at the end of the show as him and his crew exited the Rising Tides Bar

We called it a night and looked forward to Cozumel the next day.