Upcoming Peru photos

I'm finally getting around to uploading the Peru photos to flickr. If anyone reading this (people do?) is friends with Adriana on Facebook, you'd have seen some of the photos. For some awesome reason, Facebook mangles some of the photos to appear grainy... not like Facebook is a great photo sharing site anyway (it's fine for drunk or phone photos). Having said that, some of the sets are on flickr already, but I'm re-doing my Lightroom workflow and so they're going to be updated with more info and some calibration edits, so I'm not 'publishing' them here yet.

I've always taken panoramic photos on my trips, so they will be in there too. There are a couple of HDR photos too. I dabbled with some 3D photos this time since I recently purchased a Holmes viewer. You can also view such photos using a cross-eyed technique, but after a while you *will* get a headache (and then some people have trouble seeing the 3D using this technique at all). Wikipedia has a good intro to stereoscopy, and just how damn old the technique is, but I'll do a more in-depth post regarding that later.

Anyways, back to it.

I am: blue glow-stick guy

Seen at the Hybrid DJ set at Revolution, downtown Ft Lauderdale.

Honeymoon photos - Venice, Bologna, Perugia

This last post regarding the honeymoon covers the couple of days we spent in Venice, and the subsequent drive down to Perugia via Bologna.

We found Venice to be amazing, and loved wandering around the maze of buildings and water, not really caring when a dead-end was encountered. One of the very first things we checked off the list of things-to-do was a gondola ride:





We discovered early on that the quality of the food was inversely proportional to the view offered, so a view for lunch like the one below resulted in pretty terrible food.



Wandering around the streets, we came across some pretty amazing things, like this outdoor classical music performance.



While the first day was spent walking around getting lost in backstreets, the second was spent navigating the ferry system and hopping from island to island. We visited Murano to see the glassmakers. The following video shows how a glass horse is made.



Pink glass lamps were everywhere.



We explored Murano, visited Lido (and bumped into some friends while there, which floored me at the time), and took a night stroll around Venice where I got the opportunity for some night shots, like this one:



We then drove down to Bologna and had a fantastic lunch, spending some time admiring the medieval architecture. We spent that night in Perugia (Baci chocolate!) and the next day encountered some sort of Catholic procession moving through the town square. Notable about this was the large Jesus-figure made out of sand and rose petals:



We finally made our way back to Rome for our flight back to the US. We were exhausted at the end, but it was such a fantastic trip and have many memories from it, and again we thank everyone who contributed towards it.

There are a bunch more photos that I couldn't include here, this would have been a massive post if I tried to. The flickr link for the set is here.

Honeymoon photos - Pisa, Milan, Lake Como, Verona

The hire car (a Fiat Punto) really got a work-out on this stretch of the trip. Driving from Florence we arrived in Pisa, walked to the Leaning Tower and saw this:



Now, I get enough of that sort of stuff with Wii Fit at home, so Adriana and I got a very creative photo taken, and I think you'll agree:



After Pisa we drove north to Cinqueterre, which I've already posted about. We must have driven through about thirty tunnels on the way there, and it was great how they indicated the length of each tunnel before you entered it. It gave you an idea of whether you should try holding your breath or not. Also, although the countryside may be scenic and the weather near perfect, try to avoid driving with the windows down. A small wasp could get sucked into the car, get caught in the back of your shirt, and then sting you, which can be quite fun if you're driving. Just saying.

After Cinqueterre we continued driving north to Milan, where we arrived at our really nice West Elm-like hotel, "The Hub".



In Milan we got to see 'The Last Supper', though unfortunately you aren't allowed to take photos of it. Some people did put a door through it at some stage though, so Jesus' feet are cut off, something I only learned about on the day.

A day trip was planned to the Lake Como area and this, along with Civita, turned out to be another highlight of our trip. It was simply amazing. I somehow navigated the car through narrow roads up to Menaggio where we had a scenic lunch.



Ferries transport you between the three lakeside towns of Menaggio, Bellagio and Varenna:


View Larger Map

So we left Menaggio:



visited Varenna:



and then headed to Bellagio:



before heading back to Milan. On the next day we started our drive East to Venice, and stopped off in Verona where we saw Juliet's house, a small Colosseum, and a nice view over the river:



Click here for a link to the set on Flickr.

Honeymoon photos - Cinqueterre

About an hour's drive north of Pisa is Cinqueterre, or "The five lands". This national park protected area consists of five 'preserved' towns situated along the west coast: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare. All are connected by train and walking paths (you can walk between all of them in a day), and most are connected by water ferry.

We spent two nights in the area, giving us a whole day to explore the towns, starting with Monterosso al Mare:





We caught a water ferry to the next town, Manarola:



We caught a train, which turned out to be express to the town we planned on visiting last, Riomaggiore. Oh well!



We walked from Riomaggiore to Manarola, along a path known as "Via dell'Amore", or the "path of love".



The "thing" to do along this path was bring a lock and lock it into the fence or... anywhere you possibly could.



We had a pesto-filled lunch in Manarola, and Adriana made friends with a group of pensioners.



We caught a train to the last town, Corneglia, which is the only town that was not situated on the edge of the water, but rather up on a hill. While there we sampled and purchased some of the sweet dessert wine "Sciacchetrà" and I got my bottle of regional dry white wine.



After this trip, we continued to head up north to Milan. That (and photos from Pisa, by the way) are for a separate post.

You can see the whole set for Cinqueterre here.

Honeymoon photos - Civita, Florence, Siena and surrounds.

The flickr link for this part of the honeymoon is here.

We spent around five days sightseeing Rome (and getting over any jetlag). After that we picked up our car rental, somehow navigated our way through Roman traffic, and headed up towards Florence. On the way, we stopped off at a small town called Civita (civita di Bagnoregio).





We ate at the restaurant just before the starting the walk up to Civita, and ate some of the best Italian food we've ever had. That, combined with the sights seen in Civita itself, made it one of the highlights of our honeymoon.

Continuing north we visited Orvieto, ate some more fantastic food and took in some of the sights.



We arrived in Florence late that night, and spent the next day visiting the Uffizi galleries and any of the obvious tourist sites (although some places we couldn't be bothered waiting in the line for, like with this first photo. At some point you just get churched-out)





We then spent a day travelling back down South to visit Siena, which we actually ended up enjoying more than Florence (fewer tourists and prettier in areas).





If you visit the flickr link given above, you'll also see a woman having a fairly heated discussion on her phone. Not the first such discussion we saw in Italy, mind you.

Ever so often while driving around we saw a field of poppies. Actually driving to a point where a photo could be taken of such a field proved to be fairly difficult. After taking a very local dirt road (thank you GPS), we came across a field, so I was able to get my photo.

Honeymoon photos - Rome

Firstly, thank you to everyone who contributed to our online honeymoon registry (and thank you of course if you contributed in some other way). Adriana and I had a fantastic time in Italy. Over the next week or so I'll be uploading photos from the trip, starting today with Rome.

A link to the set on Flickr is here.

Some photos:

Ducktales (episode 3)

So, Razzi and the ducklings have now left the shelter of casa Kristian y Adriana. This is the last photo I have of them at their condo abode:



I'm fairly impressed, and relieved, with how Bropey has stepped into the role of protector and is looking after Razzi and the ducklings. We've also noticed how brown he is getting, after having either black or dark green feathers only a couple of weeks ago.



Last photo for this post: where ducklings come from.



These and more photos have been added to this photo set.

By the way, if there are any ducks out there reading this in an egg-laying mood, we have three spacious and well-kept planters available, free of charge.

Ducktales (episode 2)

They have arrived.



We were starting to wonder when they were going to hatch, if ever. As it turned out, we were a week off of when we thought Razzi actually started sitting on the eggs. To see the first duckling appear this morning was absolutely amazing. To see another breaking out of its shell was incredible. At the last count there were ten ducklings.

I wanted to get photos and possibly video, but without disturbing Razzi constantly. So I set up my camera on a tripod and configured it to take a photo every minute. I also set up my phone to stream video to http://qik.com/daecks so we could watch the actual video stream. At around the fifteen second mark in this video: http://qik.com/video/5594953 you can see the duckings moving about with Razzi staying guard.

Near the end of the day, Razzi had to leave to go feed (as if we didn't feed her enough already), so she 'trusted' us enough to leave the duckings alone with us looking on. I was able to grab this video (no audio since I was shooting through glass so you couldn't hear them anyway) while she was away:



To close it out, here they are looking pretty exhausted, and a link to the Flickr set follows:



Flickr set link.

Ducktales (episode 1)

One of the Muscovy ducks that hangs out around our place is called "Razzi". Meet Razzi:



I noticed one day that the calla lillies in one of the planters on our patio were all flattened. I uncovered a bit of debris from the flattening and found two duck eggs. Anyone who knows farmer boy PK could guess that I was absolutely over the moon! A week or so later, the planter looked like this:



We're expecting that sometime this week the eggs will hatch. Razzi is patiently waiting for this to happen, albeit with the probably-too-often intrusion from some inquisitive humans. Eh, at the end of the day, she seems to be pretty chill about it:

A photo in Playboy magazine!

Yes, but it's not the type of photo one might associate with that magazine. Yonks ago while on a road trip with a couple of other Aussies, I noticed a sign advertising a brothel called the "Shady Lady Ranch". I was able to quickly snap a photo of the sign as we flew past it (I'm still using that 200mm zoom lens, I love it), posted it up online and never thought of it again. I was contacted by Playboy magazine for permission to use the photo in an article on the ranch. I never did receive the free copy of the magazine I requested, but I was able to track down the Oct 2009 issue which had the article, shown below.



The original image is here.