Tag Archives: Photography

Travel

Poland, 2004

I’ve never been the kind of person who just likes to sit on beaches, soaking up the rays. I always burn and I always think that I might be missing something, an amazing sight, some unusual food or a classic local beer.

Sometimes however, I think that I try to over-do things. My recent trip to Poland certainly had the potential. The plan was to fly to Warsaw, try to take in Gdansk, an obscure part of Russia called Kaliningrad that is surrounded by EU states and then nip into Lithuania for a swift look around Vilnius.

Not all went to plan, but we did put plenty of miles in! Most of the distance was covered on roads that had been completed (concentrating hard on the directions, we missed a diversion sign and ended up driving down a partially completed highway) and much was within the speed-limits. We got to the Kaliningrad border only to be told “No” by the border guard. Whether he meant we couldn’t go through or was just replying to the implicit question “Do you speak English?” we’re not sure. The hire car company thwarted our efforts to drive into Lithuania and the bus and train timetables conspired against us, so we never got to Vilnius either.

We did get to see Warsaw, Gdansk, Malbork, Suwalski, Bialystok and much more! I think you’ll agree that that is a lot of ground to cover in one long weekend!

One final note: some Polish words have characters I can’t find on this keyboard (or for use on the web). The main one is an “l” with a line through it, as in Bialystok. My apologies to Polish speakers; I did try to spell it all correctly!

Click the small pictures below for a full size version.

All pictures here have been taken on my EOS300D with the 18-55mm lens. Many of the outdoor pictures were taken using a polarising filter.

If the pictures have piqued your interest, there are a few resources that you might want to have a look out for:

Travel

Tuscany, Italy, 2004

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I’ve been to Italy a few times over the years, but I’ve somehow managed to avoid Tuscany which is, perhaps, the most favoured of areas with photographers. This Easter I managed to correct that situation with a short walking holiday.

Starting in Pisa, we took a taxi to San Gimignano and walked to Colle di Val d’Elsa. From here we wandered along to Siena, stopping off at interesting looking places and sampling the local food and wine — it’d be rude not to! On the way back, we stopped in Pisa but managed to avoid taking amusing pictures of us propping up the leaning tower. (If only everyone else showed such restraint!)

Also see my older pictures in Milan and around Lake Garda.

All shots were taken with my EOS300 film camera — they would have been on digital, but I have a lot of unexposed film left! I’ve used Fuji Sensia II slide film and many of the out-door shots have been enhanced with a polarising filter.

If the pictures have piqued your interest, there are a few web Sites that you might want to visit:

  • The itinerary and hotels were all booked by a tour company. Still, the Insight Compact Guide to Tuscany (UK or US) was very useful for filling in some of the background information on the area.
Travel

Miscellaneous Pictures, 2003

Like most people I take the majority of my pictures while on holiday. But that’s not the only time. Here you’ll find some odds and ends, places I’ve been where I was only there for a short time or where there are only a few reasonable ones!

The first batch are from my month-long stint at my companies Malta office (actually at the tail-end of 2002). There would have been more pictures, but it rained for much of the time I was there! Not encouraging weather for sight-seeing!

Next are pictures from closer to home. One from a friends wedding in sleepy Southwold, the next few from my “flight” on the London Eye, then a couple from Norfolk and the last two of the UK are in the Peak District. The last few are from my time in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Click the small pictures below for a full size version.

The bay near St Julians Looking over Valetta View of Malta from Mdina This tower is visible almost anywhere on the whole isla
Beach huts in Southwold, Suffolk London Eye pod View of Charing Cross from the London Eye View from the London Eye
View from the London Eye View of the London Eye Near Burnham Deepdale, Norfolk Seals on the Norfolk coast
The Peak District near Edale The Peak District near Edale Charlotte at dusk Charlotee from just out of the centre
Charlotte sky-scrapers Charlotte sky-scrapers A park in uptown Charlotte Classy Christmas Decorations

The last few pictures (the colour ones of Charlotte) are taken on my D300. All the others here have been taken on my EOS300 using Fuji Sensia II ISO100 film.

Travel

Turkey, 2003

Turkey is a big country. Opinions you’ve heard about Ankara or Istanbul do not necessarily apply. But that’s fair, smaller towns in a country are rarely anything like their capital city. We stayed hundreds of Kilometres away from either of Turkeys major cities, instead we hung in or around the Mediterranean Sea. We flew into Dalaman airport, moved to Fethiye, across to Antalya and back to Dalaman more-or-less along the coast.

This makes somewhere like Bodrum a fairer comparison. But even there, the tales of “in your face” sales techniques make it sound very different.

Even in the tiny part of Turkey that we saw, there was immense variety. On the trip there was everything from thriving local towns (where we felt like we were the only sight-seers) to tourist centres (where the first language appeared to be German) to “wilderness” that felt like it was hundreds of miles from any form of civilisation. In-between there were vast amount of Roman and Greek ruins, statues and busts of Atat?rk, lovely bays that reminded me of Italy and snow-capped mountains.

Few countries can claim to much variety in such a small area. If you can’t tell, I was impressed and I haven’t even spoken about the locals hospitality.

Click the small pictures below for a full size version.

The obligatory Atatürk statue in Fethiye. Early morning in Fethiye. An amphitheatre near Termessos. The sight on our walk from Olympos to the Chimaera
The partial roof of the theatre in Aspendos. The aqueduct at Aspendos. The landscape in southern Turkey is greener than you mi The harbour in Antalya.
The fluted minaret in Antalya Mosque in Elmali On the way to Kas. On the way to Kas.
View over Kas as we approached from the surrounding hil Kas A view from Kekova Island and how we got there. The bay A view from Kekova Island.

All pictures here have been taken on my EOS300 using Fuji Sensia II ISO100 slide film. Most of the outdoor pictures were taken using a polarising filter.

If the pictures have piqued your interest, there are a few resources that you might want to have a look out for:

  • I read Jeremy Seal’s “A Fez of the Heart”(Amazon UK/US) to get the feel of the place before I got there. Unfortunately the area I went to was barely mentioned, but it’s a good book and well worth reading.
  • Turkey.com has lots of interesting stuff including city guides and travel tips.
Travel

Tibet, 2002

I assure you: it’s not deliberate. I’d like to go on record and say that I do not plan to only go to obscure — some have even said dangerous — places. I just go where my interests lie.

I’ve been to a couple of Buddhist countries recently (Thailand and Sri Lanka), but they both practise the same kind of Buddhism — called Theravada. I originally thought that they were the less pure form, the Church of England to Tibet’s Catholicism. I went to Tibet to see the “real” Buddhism, however it turns out that, in some ways, the opposite is true (it’s a long story; leave comments!). Tibetan Buddhism (Mahayana) is actually a merger of the traditional Tibetan religion, B?n, with more normal Buddhism.

My confusion over their form of Buddhism was only the start of it. It’s a schizophrenic place, one where the peoples army destroyed some temples and preserved others, fighting between themselves on more than one occasion.

The Chinese have transformed Lhasa to such an extent that there’s now a “Tibetan Quarter,” yet the Tibetans still seem to be certain of their own identity.

It’s easy to see how people become passionate about the cause of the Tibetan people, however to deny that the Chinese have had a significant positive effect (in some ways) is undeniable.

So I’m in two minds about the place. Maybe with these pictures you’ll be able to make up your own mind. Let me know if you do!

The first few pictures here are all in Kathmandu; there are so few of them that it didn’t seem worth creating a new page for them.

Click the small pictures below for a full size version.

All pictures were taken on my EOS300 using Fuji Reala ISO100 negative film except for the first two in Kathmandu which were taken using Fuji Sensia II ISO 100 slide film. Most outdoor photographs were taken with a polarising filter.

If the pictures have piqued your interest, there are a few web Sites that you might want to visit:

  • I’ve deliberately avoided talking about the politics of the area, but as a member of Amnesty it’s difficult not to feel involved to some extent. Have a look at the Free Tibet Campaign or the main Amnesty International site if you want to read more.
  • As always, there’s a Lonely Planet guide. You can buy a copy from Amazon (UK or US). However, I found the Footprint guide to be much better (UK or US).
  • You might also like to read “Sorrow Mountain” by Ani Pachen, a Tibetan Nun. The language used is almost child-like in its simplicity, but, because of what she had to endure, it’s not an easy read. Worth the effort, though. (Available from Amazon UK or US.)
  • Tibetan Buddhism Timeline. On the trip we saw many of the important sites mentioned in this list.
The Penguin Says

GIMP 1.0

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Introduction

The hype surrounding the GIMP and its almost asymptotic ascent towards version one has been unprecedented in the open source community. When the big one-oh appeared, not only did SlashDot explode with congratulations, but there were stories on all the big commercial sites like Wired News. Why? What does GIMP have that other free software doesn’t?

Let’s not get swept away with the hype. What is the GIMP? It’s full title is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which is a bit of a give-away. It’s a bit-mapped picture editor along the lines of Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop. The developers claim that it can compete with these well known and well respected products. I’ll reserve judgment, let’s get the thing installed.

Installation

That I feel that the installation needs a mention does not bode well. The reason, however, is more than a little unfortunate. Let me explain…

One of the things that the GIMP team did before (more accurately: during) development was create a new X Toolkit called GTK. Apparently this is a nicely designed system that is also relatively small and quick. A lot of people like it, including RedHat who used it to build some of their utilities. The problem is that the version of GTK that the GIMP uses is newer than the one that RedHat 5 uses.

The upshot of all this is that, although the GIMP works absolutely fine, I can no longer user UserNet to connect to my ISP or the control panel to administer my system. Because of all the interdependencies, RPM seems to get quite upset if I try and downgrade and even then GIMP will be broken. (I suspect that the real solution would be to recompile UserNet and control-panel using the new libraries.

User Interface

I doubt that the developers will be too upset if I describe the user interface as unusual. I don’t think I’ve seen another program quite like it.

When the GIMP starts only a tool palette appears on the screen. It’s quite busy, with twenty-one monochrome buttons, a colour-picker at the bottom and a menu bar at the top, but it does look smart and presentable — not something to be taken for granted with much free software. The icons are all fairly obvious. You can open an image either from the file menu or by pressing Control-O. The GIMP makes a big effort to be operational from the keyboard.

The image opens in a new window, unlike the Paint Shop Pro MDI-style interface. Personally I found moving between windows to select tools to be a bit of a drag, however the effort required here is probably more a function of the window manager than the GIMP itself. (During testing I was using the XFCE2 environment.) Fortunately you don’t need to head over to the tool palette every time you want a different gadget. There is a context sensitive menu available by right-clicking the mouse. The menu has all the menu options available in the palette window in addition to the various tools.

Many of the menus lead to a dialog of some kind. Most of these dialogs remain on the screen until you dismiss them — not when you’ve clicked ‘Apply’ like in Paint Shop Pro. This is excellent as it allows much more in the way of experimentation. As does the multiple undo function, which seems to be limited only by memory. (Being a bit-mapped image application, limited by memory doesn’t mean quite as much as it does in most other programs. After five minutes of playing around, the GIMP had consumed over a quarter of system memory!)

So, yes. The interface is unusual, but it’s certainly not bad. After a short time I think people could be very productive with it.

Features

I’m no expert in graphics programs, but the GIMP certainly looks complete. It has everything that I use on a regular basis in Paint Shop Pro and plenty of other things that it doesn’t.

I’ll go through the vague process that I went through to get to the accompanying picture. (Vague because I can’t remember exactly how I did it. I did say the GIMP encourage experimentation.)

First I loaded the picture of myself. This is the picture that’s on my pass at work and is, therefore, in real need of improvement. Then I used the Select By Colour option to pick up most of my face. I’m not entirely sure what I did next, but it looks as though I managed to paste my face back into a slightly different area. I don’t think I’ve ever looked so scary.

Next I stumbled across the filter that added the lines around the edge — I can’t for the life of me find exactly what I used again. I guess I’ll just have to keep playing around. Next I erased every other row.

I found the text handling module to to very good, far better than Paint Shop Pro. It allows you to select text in point or pixel size and choose from any font on your system. I picked a font that I have in Windows 95 (as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t rate XFree86’s native fonts) and added a legend top and bottom.

I’d be the first to acknowledge that it is some way from even slightly artistic, but it was very easy to create and touched on a number of the GIMPs features. I did play with much more than this, but managed to undo all the other less desirable effects.

Conclusion

The GIMP is very cool, no doubt about it. Any free application that can compete with an eighty pound program and beat it in most cases and come a close second in others is worth a look. But when that same program can come as close as makes no difference for most people to the eight hundred pound market leader then you have to sit up and take notice.

Of course, it is a first release so it isn’t perfect. It’s not quite as fast as it could be. There are some occasional glitches, hangs and crashes, but they are few and far between and, certainly, no more frequent than in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.

Fully featured, fairly simple to use and very powerful, it could well be the killer application that Linux so desperately needs.