Lithuania

Photo of the Day – Sweeping the Gate of Dawn

At the Gates of Dawn in Vilnius, Lithuania, views generally look upwards to the painting of Mary or the archway, above which she hangs. But this shot takes a bit more of an earthly approach and gazes downward. It’s the humanist in me, I guess.

Click for a larger version on flickr:

Gate of Dawn in Vilnius

More photos of Lithuania
More photos of Vilnius
More photos of the Gate of Dawn


Photos of Kaunas, Lithuania

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!

Kaunas, Lithuania

Kaunas, Lithuania

Kaunas, Lithuania


Baltics Photos Trickling In

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!