2 weeks ago we have returned from our trip to Seychelles. As is normal for us we went there on our own, and we used information from last-minute travel deals just to beat their prices :-) Our expenses were about same to prices offered by holiday search engines (self-catering), but they offer just single island and we were on 3 of them. Plus our sum contains everything we've spent.
Finally I am getting somewhere with HDR photography
Added: November 16, 2011
The first time I heard about HDR was about 6 years ago. After the first enthusiasm I learned it is not so easy. But I kept bracketing at occasions (sometimes quite often) and tried several different applications to process them. But I was never satisfied. I was never targeting surreal results, I just wanted to get good looking photos in situations cameras were not able to help. I was hardly ever satisfied, many times the result was pure frustration or even disgust. I have shown some of my results in this blog, just because the result seemed better than single exposure. But that does not mean I was happy with them.
I usually avoid showing photos of us in this blog. This, however, will not be the case of this post. Even stranger, it will not contain any photo done by me or Zuzka. Copyright holder for all following photos is Jozef Staš.
Zuzka and me have travelled together for some time already. So after returning from our Round the World trip we started to prepare the biggest and longest journey in our lives. Well, Zuzka and her parents were busy, I was helping only with a few things.
It is all over. It took me much longer to process all photos and publish them then I wanted to, but there were other important things to do.
All together it was nice 1.5 year since we started planning/booking until now when everything is published. Apart from travelling I really liked parallel processing of photos and publishing. I was ahead of processing by several weeks worth of photos so I had nice flashbacks to 2 places at same time. Writing blog about New Zealand and processing photos from South America.
I don't have any photos from Lima, because everybody said Lima is unsafe and it is better not to attract attention. I decided that 1.5kg camera setup might attract some attention of potential muggers so I left everything packed. Zuzka took some photos, but she is not here right now. Next week, when she returns, I might add one or two just to provide thumbnail for this post.
27/12/2009 - 26/02/2010: Two months passed very quickly. At least compared with time spent with (dreaming,) planning, booking, ... Our flight tickets has been booked through Oneworld a year ago (March) and we started to seriously look into details of our itinerary in August.
How was it? Fantastic! But short, compared to schedules of other people we met :-( We decided to go for more conservative schedule so our employers will be more likely willing to accept us back :-) Thanks to package price for flight tickets we could compensate for lack of time by having more flights at places where people usually use bus. I am slowly processing all photos. They will take some time as well as their publishing.
Only a few more days are ahead of us. We are heading to Rio de Janeiro tomorrow and after couple of days on beach to home.
Again the same problem with NEFs...
Greetings from the middle of our holiday in South Hemisphere. We are leaving Australasia tomorrow, heading to South America so maybe it is good time to write something.
Unfortunately I shoot only RAWs and I do not have any way to process them during our trip. In order to publish at least something I have decided to shoot also small JPEGs for 2 days. But then I still have problem with downsizing. Only quick way to work around that (without much googling) is to upload photo to facebook and let it to downsize it for me, followed by using Paint to convert them into JPEGs :-) .
Last week we have returned from our 3 weeks long vacation in China. It was amazing holidays. It was our first vacation with a tour operator. We decided to use tour operator because it is not easy for individuals to get to Tibet. Visa are hard to get and going out of Lhasa needs "paperwork" too. Not to mention it is very hard to read Chinese for us ;-) , "nobody" speaks English and it is not possible to book train tickets online (tickets can be bought 2 days ahead and that does not suit my life style well).
We were bit unsure how it will be with operator, because we prefer to travel alone, but I have to say Explore outdid all our expectations. It seems Explore is oriented to customers similar to us (just older). And our tour leader Rich made our experience even better. He was fantastic. He worked hard to satisfy everybody (that is very hard in my point of view) and he succeeded. He helped Zuzka in restaurants to get meals suiting her allergy and he stopped bus any time he heard me taking pictures frantically (yes, I started to take photos through windows of bus, which is... not very satisfying). I have taken unbelievable number of photos, all our colleagues were shocked or amused after learning how many I have made. But many of them were just repeating existing photo just in case previous one was not good (remember - many of them were taken in bus or train (Rich could not stop train for me unfortunately)). So total number of independent compositions is much smaller... I am in the middle of processing them now and it will take some time before I am done, but I am able to publish about a few days from beginning. So stay close to Internet :-)
This post is not about any trip, but it still means a lot for me. This is the first time my photos got published! :-)
I was contacted by Timberbush Tours last summer because they liked my photos on blog I have taken during our trip in Scotland with them. Of course I was delighted when they asked if they could use my photos in their brochures for next year. Not only because it is my first opportunity to get published (without much effort), but also because I really like how Timberbush Tours are doing their business. So it is twice as much honour for me. Several months passed and I am holding 2 nice brochures in my hands now (trips from Edinburgh and Glasgow). Only 5 of photos are mine, but that's more than I would believe if somebody told me during those trips :-)
So it is finally happing. Zuzka was dreaming about trip to India for 10 years. All her friends who she asked to go with her exhaled deeply. They are safe now :-) And I, who never thought about going to India and was afraid of it since I have promised I will accompany her, am staying in cold weather at Cardiff bus station waiting for bus to Heathrow. So it is finally happening...
It took me some time to get courage, but now I am looking forward to our India trip nearly as much as Zuzka. It is the most exotic place we have ever been to. As was said in India - Lessons Learned we have only 12 days and our program is full. Surprisingly I am more optimistic that everything will work correctly than Zuzka, but we are about to see soon. There will be surprises, but we hope they will be only positive ones.
We have returned from our short trip to India a few days ago and I would like to write about what we have learned about India which can be useful to others. Complete report with pictures will follow shortly. We have been there only 12 days with flying there and back so I am not going to claim we have learned everything or this will be complete guide. Contrary we have learned only basic things and I am sure even those are not correct :-) I have decided to write separate post about this only to help future readers to find complete information at one place. Otherwise it would be split to several posts and quite hard to find.
This text turned out to be quite long, so if you are not interested reading it completely, you can jump to the most interesting part.
I am slowly adding new features to this blog. You probably noticed recent change in design and new gallery-like navigation.
A feature I knew since beginning I am going to add, but was a bit afraid for long time are comments. I needed to think about way how to avoid spams and other nasty things that happen in Internet world. So it took me long time, but it is available here now.
I look forward to hearing from you and I hope there will not be many comments that I will be forced to delete. In case of something terrible, I am able to turn all comments off in a few seconds.
And stay tuned for more enhancements.
We are back from Norway. It was great, I really don't understand how we could think Norway is not as nice as Iceland :-) Maybe weather somehow fulfilled those fears, because we had much better weather in Iceland.
What was really surprising, many parts of Norway reminded us Slovakia. Mountains, valleys were often very similar. Of course Arctic circle and fjords were completelly different. Cherries were bigger and together with strawberries they were much more expensive. Still we bought about 2kg of strawberies and 1 kg of cherries per person...
It might sound a bit of familiar now, but I am not able to show many photos from Norway yet. I still have half of Iceland unfinished and I would like to finish it first. What might help with sooner publication abour Norway is that I do not remember much from Iceland now ;-) .
To show you at least something - here you have panorama from Bergen: Bryggen.
Original plan was to finish all posts about Iceland today. However, as is quite normal, a lot of problems occured so I was not able to finish more than one half. There were problems with color management, not enough time during evenings and finally (this is not problem, it was planned) I needed to finish details about our Norway trip that begins later tomorrow (Thursday).
So I would like to appologize to all few readers I have and beg for their patience. I'll be back and then everything gets published. In the meantime you can look forward for big waterfalls, more lupines, geothermal fields and similar. Not to mention fjords from Norway, even higher mountains and trees :-)
Small preview of missing photos from Iceland:
Just a moment ago I received 'Thank you' email from Expedia for booking flight tickets to Keflavik with them. Nice touch, but those who have read my last post know that flight was cancelled and refunded in March.
So their service is not terrible only because they forgot to send me mail about cancelation (they had only "there are problems with you booking - call NNNNNN (so you can pay us for asking for refund ;-) )" statement on web page that I found only thanks to pure luck, but they also forgot that they refunded it!
Now I am kicking myself. If I knew that before the "flight" I could ask for another refund :-D Or maybe my paranoid self should start to be worried ;-)
BTW photos are slowly coming, stay tuned.
I changed ordering of posts to more natural way - the newest post is at top (when I had only 3 posts, it was OK to go down a bit for newest one, but it is not so any more).
Tags are added to make searching easier (still needs some work).
Again one post without pictures. This time, I'd like to inform you about presence of RSS feed you can subscribe to. Just use the link RSS feed
It might not be perfect yet, but I am going to tune it up if problem occurs. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
So I finally created and deployed blog application. This post has nothing with pictures, it is to welcome you here.
So ENJOY MY POSTS HERE!
There might be some serious problems as this is my first serious Rails application. I will try to get rid of them as soon as possible.
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