1382 - Mary's Of The Sea

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 2 Responses »
Jul 282010

I was not in a photographing mood. I did take photographs today, a lot even, but almost all of them were textures. Walls, stone, cracking paint and the like. When I made yesterday’s “1381 – I See A Darkness“, I blended in a texture of cracks in a big block of wood, and while I browsed my collection for textures, I realized that they were not only poorly tagged in the database, but also that I don’t have as many as I thought. This averted my view today and made me mostly look at old walls :)

OK, that’s today’s excuse for why you get another picture from Italy :D

Here is Camogli again, same place as yesterday’s darkness, same time, only here I use the 17-50 and look towards “Santa Maria Assunta”, St Mary’s, the church directly at the beach.

The Song of the Day is “Marys Of The Sea” from Tori Amos’ 2005 album “The Beekeeper”. Only live versions float the net, so here is one on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 7:42 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

1359 - Wicked Game

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC No Responses »
Jul 062010

Allow me please to make an indecent proposal.

As we all know, fame and fortune are a direct and automatic consequence of merit, right? Just work hard, be good, and it will be recognized, yes? No?

Well, probably it is not just that automatic, probably at times we need to help Fortuna along, take her by the hand, lead her in the right direction. I suppose this is such a time :)

Yesterday night (yeah, yeah, this is supposed to be the blog post for Saturday, and now it’s already Tuesday morning again, I’m late, I know), after only about three months, I have finished my Eclipse / GlassFish / Java EE 6 Cookbook, a blog post on my Programming blog. Being here for photography, most of you won’t be interested in it. Still, it’s a damn fine tutorial about a topic that is not broadly covered. It’s comprehensive, well researched and would print to about 80 pages. That’s not shabby. It needs exposure though.

May I make an indecent proposal?

Could we perhaps play a game together? The wicked game of creating public interest? Even when Java programming is probably the thing that interests you the least, may I beg you to go to my tutorial, scroll down to the very bottom and use one of those icons, to share my tutorial on Facebook, to digg it, to stumble it, set bookmarks on Google, Yahoo or Delicious, whatever you use, whatever you happen to have logins for. It would drive users from those social bookmarking sites to my tutorial, some may return later, and that would greatly help in building an audience for this fledgling blog of mine.

Of course this is a little bit dishonest, this is tricking the game, but on the other hand, this is just what advertising does to us all the time, and I don’t even sell something, to the contrary, I’m giving away a compendium of my experience … for free. Thanks a lot for considering.

The Image of the Day is from June 20 and was taken in Lavagna, Liguria, Italy, just the next town north of where we stayed. I didn’t take any images on Saturday. The Song of the Day is of course “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 4:35 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

1352 - I'm Going Back Home

Nikon 70-300 VR, Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 2 Responses »
Jul 022010

Saturday we left. I did not take any images. The car was full, my camera bag safely stowed in the back, and the return home were six hours on the highway, thus I wouldn’t have been able to take images anyway.

All images presented here were taken on Sunday afternoon, shortly before we had dinner, not in the restaurant depicted, there we had been the day before.

Anna Maria, a friend of Michael’s from Milano, had asked him why we had exactly picked Sestri Levante for our vacation. Well, you have to pick some place, do you? Now, looking back, I can say that the choice was excellent, and I can say it with much confidence.

It is our way of traveling, to visit sights, and Sestri Levante being in the middle of the Riviera Levante, the part of the Riviera east of Genova, was an ideal place. It has a highway exit and a train station (Michael arrived from Milano by train), but contrary to many other towns and villages on the Riviera, neither highway nor railway are obtrusive.

While Camogli was much more beautiful, it was much easier to get out of Sestri, and that’s not a bad thing when you do it daily. The beach was directly in front of the hotel, thus I could swim in the morning and before dinner, so, all in all I’d say Sestri Levante was a fine place for people with our interests.

The Song of the Day is “I’m Going Back Home” by Nina Simone. I have it on a four CD collection “Four Women: The Complete Nina Simone On Philips”. Hear it on YouTube.

Posted by andreas at 1:37 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

1351 - Darkness, Darkness

Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC 2 Responses »
Jul 012010

The two villages down along the coast from Sestri Levante, Moneglia and Fornaci, are only accessible from the north via two long tunnels.

Each of those tunnels is actually a succession of tunnels, with the longest one maybe four kilometers long, and the interesting thing is, that they have only one lane. There are semaphores on each side and fixed times when they go green.

Here you see the entrance to the first tunnel in Riva, a part of Sestri Levante with a long beach and some ugly industry, most likely wharves. There is a minimum speed of 40 km/h in the tunnels and a maximum of 60 km/h.

After having arrived in Moneglia, I thought that it was a shame that I had no images of the tunnel itself, so I set the camera to manual focus, high speed continuous mode, speed priority with 1/250s, f2.8 and hoped for the best.

In the next long tunnel I was prepared. I only had to raise the camera through the car’s open roof, press the shutter and see what I get. It was not even distracting from driving. But then, I probably wouldn’t do it with a policeman in sight :)

The image with the boats was taken in Sestri Levante, after sundown on our last evening there.

The Song of the Day is “Darkness, Darkness” from the Cowboy Junkies’ 2004 album “One Soul Now”. This is some more music that I learned to know via Bill Birtch’s blog. Thank you Bill :)

YouTube has the song.

Posted by andreas at 8:53 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
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