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At the end of January, 2015, we took a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Joel, Daphne, Karen and Larry cruised on the MV Integrity (INCA tours) for a week among the Eastern islands. Here is a selected set of the photographs taken by Joel during the trip as well as one day in Quito, Ecuador. If you are short of time, just look at the Selected Best Pictures gallery.

About these pictures.

I took two cameras with me on this trip. Most of the pictures were taken using a Sony NEX-5N with a Tamron 18mm-200mm lens. The camera and lens choice represents a good compromise between picture quality and equipment weight. The camera plus lens come in under 2 pounds. Whenever possible, I used a monopod to stabilize the camera, or a tripod for sunrise and sunset pictures.

For the underwater pictures, as well as the pictures in Quito, I used a Canon PowerShot S95 camera. This camera is usually used by Daphne to take pictures for her garden blog, but it can be put in an underwater case for use while snorkeling (I did not want to risk the Sony to an underwater case).

All pictures were shot in both RAW and JPG. The JPG versions were copied onto an Apple iPad so we could look at the pictures while on the trip. The RAW pictures were copied to my Windows 7 computer once I got home and post processed in Adobe Lightroom.

None of the pictures are "photoshopped". But I do use Lightroom to adjust global settings such as white balance, sharpness, exposure, saturation and cropping. GPS coordinates were added to the images by hand (neither camera includes GPS capabilities), so the coordinates are only approximate.

Fernando Ortiz (our guide) helped me identify the various species of animal, bird and fish in each of the pictures before we left the boat. And when known, the identification is included in the picture caption.

Selecting which pictures to post is always the most complex part of my post processing workflow. Every night on the trip I would review the day's pictures on the camera and delete as many as I could without a big screen. When I got home, I still had 1557 pictures to review. It took about a month to whittle that down to the pictures in these galleries.

Enjoy - Joel Gould, February 2015.