September 23rd, 2008
Boston.com’s always-inspiring The Big Picture today has a batch of images from India.
The Big Picture is consistently full of great photos and is a great site to visit on a regular basis, but this gallery, in particular, caught my eye. It makes me eager to head back to Asia. Fingers crossed that I might get to do so sooner than later…
September 22nd, 2008
The post from DIY photography has a couple of helpful hints about reducing the amount of plugs, adapters and wires you need to bring along with you the next time you are taking your camera on the road.
Depending on the amount of gear you take with you, it can be a bit of a hassle to have to tick off a dozen trinkets on your packing list just to keep your gadgets charged. This tip aims to minimize that clutter.
August 31st, 2008
Tomorrow, work will be shipping me off to Portugal for four weeks of Southern coast living. Everyone on the team I’m going with is eager to get away from the damp Manchester weather and out into the bright sunshine. My schedule out there should be pretty busy, but I may have time for some updates while I’m backing up files and such. Hopefully, I’ll have enough fun stories that you’ll want to follow along.
Now where did I put my sunscreen?
August 11th, 2008
A short trip from Riga lies the small hills and valleys of Sigulda. A nice spot to get away from the big city, this countryside locale hosts a the ruins of Sigulda castle and also the much more impressive (and much more intact) Turaida castle.
The valley is also home to a charming but tragic legend of a young maiden who refused to submit to the whims of a Polish soldier. Though she was in love with a local commoner, she was lured to a cave by the soldier. When she realized what was happening, she presented him with her “magic” scarf which she said protected the wearer from all injury. To demonstrate its effectiveness, she donned the scarf and coaxed the soldier to swing his sword at her. The end result was an ignorant soldier chopping her head off and an enduring legend of everlasting love.
The caves where the maiden met her end and where she also spent happier times with her love are both popular spots near the Gauja river. Neither of them, however, is going to be too exciting for anyone that doesn’t appreciate the legend - without the tales, the caves are relatively small holes in the side of a low cliff. So, just remember to pack the fable along with you and you should enjoy yourself.
Have a look at my photos of Sigulda here.
July 20th, 2008
Continuing on with my photography of the Baltics, I have just uploaded a gallery of photos of Kaunas, Lithuania.
It’s small old town is scenic and on the other side of the city, the St Michael the Archangel church is impressive. It was in Kaunas, that I had one of my more memorable adventures in the Baltics which involved me poorly planning a route up a hill, hopping a couple of barbed wire fences, narrowly escaping potentially-nasty falls then crossing paths with a drunken member of the Russian mafia (I’m pretty sure!) and having to politely refuse a trip to a strip club with him where who knows what would have happened! The whole thing got my adrenaline going just a wee bit…
If my photos are at least half as exciting, I will have done my job. Check them out!
July 9th, 2008
After a couple of marathon processing sessions, last night, I put up my photos of Tallinn, Estonia. This gorgeous medieval city was almost too wonderful to be real. At times, it felt like I might have stumbled into Disneyland, but it was always much more fantastic than any theme park.
These photos join my shots of Vilnius, Lithuania and my images of Riga, Latvia from my trip through the Baltic states. Please have a look!
June 30th, 2008
Thanks to a busy schedule, it has taken me a while to put up my photos of Riga, Latvia, but here they are! As with my photos of Vilnius, Lithuania, I have not yet included descriptions or keywords for the galleries - they will be added later. For now, you shouldn’t have trouble finding anything.
Of the three Baltic capitals I visited, Riga felt most like a modern city. It’s medieval old town was not quite as compartmentalized from the rest of the modern developments like Tallinn, for example. Vilnius felt considerably smaller and didn’t seem to come with as many of the trappings of a larger city.
That said, Riga was still a wonder to explore. The art nouveau architecture was ubiquitous and it was impossible to get bored wandering the cobbled streets and visiting the plentiful landmarks.
Have a look at the photos here.
June 12th, 2008
After last night’s glitches were ironed out by a moment of clarity, I can now happily report that my gallery of photos of Vilnius, Lithuania is now up and ready for your viewing pleasure.
I got off to a rocky start in Vilnius with a cab driver and B&B manager both ripping me off. That’s not so great when they’re really the first two people you meet in the country!
It was, however, smooth sailing after that and I gleefully wandered the fantastic medieval streets of the capital of Lithuania. The medieval old town held enough treasures for me to walk until very ugly things started happening to my feet. And then I walked some more. When I have a camera in hand and I’m surrounded by a beautiful city, I don’t notice so much.
In the interest of getting the photos online quickly, I have not yet provided descriptions and keywords for all the images. This will follow once more photos are online, but if you need any further information about any of the photos, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Enjoy the Vilnius gallery!
June 11th, 2008
Between addressing mysteriously non-functional contact forms on this site and pulling my hair out because of a massive amount of corrupt image files, I’ve managed to upload a group of galleries of photos from Vilnius Lithuania. There is plenty more where that came from and sometime tomorrow (depending on where in the world you are), there should be a complete set of my photos from that beautiful city.
For those of you who are curious, those corrupt files of mine are, in fact, my Baltics photos. All the RAW files that I had sorted seem now to have corrupt headers and Photoshop won’t open them at all. All these RAW files are saved elsewhere, but they are unsorted and unprocessed, so this glitch is more than a little bit irritating. What’s strange about it though: All the files still open in Lightroom. I guess I’ll be learning that app pretty quickly! So, the data is all there - it’s just some messed up header or something that’s preventing the files from opening.
The files seem to have gotten corrupted when I (and apparently, this was a foolish mistake) renamed my folder from “Baltics” to “Baltics sorted.” After that, every RAW file in there got sick.
I don’t know if this is related to the problems people are experiencing with OS 10.5.3 and Photoshop CS3, but it seems like it might be the case (even though I wasn’t saving remotely). Either way, for all you users out there who have this combination of OS and software: back up now! Now!
To top it all off, since the forms on my site aren’t working, (cross your fingers for a good reply from my host!), even if someone goes to my contact page and mails me a miracle fix, I won’t get the message! Best to leave it in the comments. Any happy thoughts are welcome too.
Update: Why didn’t anyone tell me to update my Camera RAW plugin? That fixed it all up. No corrupt files, just a messed up plugin. Too bad I panicked when I saw my files wouldn’t open and immediately assumed they were corrupted. Rookie mistake.
Oh well. All’s well that end’s well!
May 22nd, 2008
I’m back from my trip to the Baltics and I had a blast. My backlog of photos to be processed just got that much bigger…
But of course, I’m not here in Manchester for long. Tomorrow, I’m heading off to Calgary, my former home. I have a week there where I anticipate a much more relaxed than my trip to the Baltics. A lot of putting my feet up and visiting with family and friends is on the agenda.
In between heavy doses of relaxing, I probably won’t be able to resist the lure of my new photos and I’ll start working on them. Hopefully, they’ll start trickling onto the site sooner than later.
Just wish my ailing back luck on the long trip over the ocean! It was bad enough today to keep me off work, so I’m a little bit angry with it and it has to do some kissing up to me. I’ve asked it to play nicely while I go on holiday and I will reward it by not lifting anything heavy for a week (except large quantities of food into my mouth).
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