The entries for this month’s photo contest are posted. The topic is “food”.
Archive for the 'Photos' Category
Here are a couple of resources I found for food photography. Here is a page linking to excellent food photography articles and advice. Also, there is a forum dedicated to food photography at bigoven.com, it seems kind of quiet but there is some good information in the posts and the food photograph gallery shown on the bottom of the page is perfect for examples.
After Taipei, I spent a couple of days in Providence to catch up on what was happening in the home office. The weather was beautiful, so I got to walk around and take some photos. What is good about Providence is that its quite photogenic and I am there about once a month, so I can see things throughout the seasons and in different weather. Spring is nice.
I also got to drive a new Mustang for a couple of days. It turned out to be a love/hate relationship, as usual. Mustangs have huge blind spots, plasticy interiors and the rentals have tiny engines with no power. It’s all flash. My old Volvo station wagon is faster than this thing. However, this one looked so nice that I couldn’t help liking it.
In downtown, I found an interesting tunnel underneath a freeway which had a skylight up in the middle of the road.
While walking around Earl’s Court and Kensington one morning, we found a large old graveyard, Brompton Cemetery. All plans were laid aside and a frenzy of picture-taking ensued. This was the best part of the whole trip and I was able to finally take photos that I felt really meant something.
Here are some photos from Windsor Castle.
Here are some photos from London. Being that we had just gotten out of Saudi Arabia, it was great to be in London and back in civilization! The first Guinness was pretty amazing.
Some recommendations for staying in London:
Stay in Earl’s Court. It’s a comfortable, easy to walk community on the train line between Heathrow and downtown. There is a Comfort Inn about 2 minutes from the train station that we were able to get a double room for $100/night which was small as usual, had a great bathroom, hot water and was very comfortable given the price. A few blocks down the street is the Troubaudor, which is great to end up at night for some dinner and music. Downstairs there are 3 or 4 local bands most nights which are worth hearing, typically pretty good quality and not too crowded! This is where people like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan played early in their careers, so it’s worth seeing.
Earl’s Court is fun to walk around, there is lots to see and it isn’t too overrun with tourists. Also, having lived in downtown Washington, DC where the population doubles in the summer from the tourists, London was great to be in during the fall! There were no crowds or lines to get into places and we could take our time.
I flew over the Saudi Arabian desert last night on an Airbus a330. It was the most disconcertingly deep blackness I have ever seen. Looking out the window, there is nothing at all. Then, a small rectangle of lights which must be an oil well, oasis or way station. Then nothing. At one point, the entire visible desert was black, until a single light appeared. For a couple of minutes, until the light was out of sight, nothing else at all could be seen.
Finally, out of the blackness appeared an immense, perfect checkerboard of roads, lit up end to end with purple, green, violet and blue neon. It was like flying over Las Vegas, but bigger.
Riyadh at night is endless neon. In the city, the streets are brilliantly lit with huge neon store signs in Arabic, while the houses and compounds are windowless, walled and dark on the outside.
The architecture is quite modern, with endless buildings under construction lining the roads.
The lack of mass media, entertainment or things to do outside has turned shopping into an art form. The shopping malls are major social centers which outshine anything in the US and are open until midnight.
With little in the way of distraction and a much larger amount of time spent inside the home, compound-style living has also resulted in an enhanced emphasis on interior decoration, demanding that the insides of cavernous buildings be beautiful and small, windowless rooms light and airy. Home furniture, lighting and interior decoration stores are everywhere.
What is the most depressing are the Western franchises. Aunt Annie’s Pretzels somehow made it over here, in addition to immense Best Buy stores.
Of course, 12 hour work days aren’t helping to experience the local culture, and any real photography inside the city is not worth the risk.
The strict segregation of men and women, a very old religion and lots of money combine into a complex mass of self-contradictions and exceptions, making any real description impossible. There are seperate, screened checkout lines, seperate seating areas and immense shopping malls, devoid of windows, for “families” only (women escorted by a male family member). In fact, aside from relatives, there is little opportunity or reason for a man to ever come into any kind of contact at all with a Saudi woman in Riyadh.
It appears that a majority of the population in Riyadh is imported labor, both skilled and unskilled. Because of this, community areas and corporate compounds have been formed for foreign workers to live, mingle and hang out on their own terms. This helps to alleviate the strict segregation restrictions for people who are living here for years.
On the plus side, I am staying in probably the best Holiday Inn ever built for around $100/ night.
We spent the weekend in NYC with friends who were visiting from Brazil. Finally got to go through the photos and put some of them online. The most memorable thing was wandering inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Mass and listening to the choir and the amazing acoustics.
Some photos from Providence.
Tonight I was at the Manassas Battlefield. It’s not easy taking a flat empty field and finding things to take good photos of. This is my third trip and I am finally starting to feel familiar with what might and might not work. I think this would be a great place to take photos in the wintertime.
This time as sunset came on I started to use the omnipod more as well as remembering to remove the polarizer (doh!).
