Views of the O2 Millennium Dome and Canary Wharf, from an apartment balcony in London’s Docklands.
O2 Millennium Dome and Canary Wharf at Sunset
Cambridge Fireworks on Midsummer Common
Taken from the wonderful vantage point of the Jesus College Boat House – the reflections in the Cam and the stunning compositions make these some of the best firework photographs I’ve taken. Also very helpful was a friend’s tip about setting the camera to bulb mode, so that shutter speeds could be easily adapted as the fireworks varied.
London (again)
Another trip down to London, this time to show a visiting friend the sights.
Interesting character on the Tube
Packed shop window in Chinatown
Quaint cottage in St. James Park
Sunset over the Thames
Bungee bouncing and Stormtroopers
London Eye, Parliament, Big Ben at night
St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Gherkin, and the City at night
Venus and the Earthlit Moon
After a long rainy streak, the return of clear skies brought not only sunshine and warmth, but also a view of the conjunction between Venus and a young crescent moon. This photograph shows the phenomenon of Earthshine, where the dark side of the moon is illuminated by sunlight reflected off the Earth’s surface.
Costa Rica – Day 2
I wasn’t planning on writing again today, but today’s events were even better than yesterday, and while I’ve got free internet at the hotel, and my family are all early-to-bed people on holiday, I thought I’d write some more :)
A couple of things I forgot to mention yesterday were that they play lots of Salsa and Merengue music everywhere, and that every time I try to speak any Spanish, I think of Italian. It’s like I have a brain elf that goes through lots of doors in my head, trying to find the right one for a word translation, and occasionally opens the wrong door and sees a word in Italian, Dutch or Hebrew. Weird analogy, but it came to me this afternoon ;) My brother has been getting by fine, having travelled around Central and Southern America a few times. Hopefully it’ll kick in. Didn’t help that we flew over here with Dutch airlines, where I found myself speaking Dutch to the staff!
Anyway, back to Costa Rica – this morning we went to Sky Trek (www.skytrek.com), which has a cable car over the tree tops (for some nice views, and to get height for the next step: a series of unbelievable zip lines hundreds of feet over the trees. There were 7 in total, and the longest was 600ft above the tree canopy, and 750m long, reaching speeds of 45mph. While the thrill was amazing, I just couldn’t get over the breathtaking views, with rainforest waaaay below, and Lake Arenal in view… I got some video footage while going along. If anyone’s seen Medicine Man, or David Attenborough documentaries, this is similar, but with a huge injection of adrenaline and speed! Alton Towers’ Air, eat your heart out ;)
On the drive back from that, we stopped on the side of the road to see a few Howler Monkeys climbing and jumping through the trees. We knew they were Howlers from the driver, and then definitely when they started howling!
We stopped in the nearest “village”, La Fortuna, which seems to have popped up due to tourism, but has kept a nice village square, church, and two high streets. Quite a few dogs wandering around, and some interesting locals, made for some good cultural photos of non-wildlife.
Saw a pair of macaws in the grounds of a neighbouring hotel, one of which flew from the trees straight onto my brother’s arm. Some pretty butterflies in their garden, and vultures swirling overhead.
Back at the hotel, the clouds cleared over the peak of the volcano, and we could see puffs of smoke appearing down the sides. The puffs progressively appeared further and further down the side of the volcano, almost like ripples appearing when you skim a stone on a pond. I then realised that the puffs were caused by lumps of rock tumbling down the side of the volcano. As it got dark, we could see these rocks glowing red, and they’d appear now and then in varying amounts. I was taking some photos of these, and suddenly saw the whole top of the volcano erupted!!!!!
An unbelievably lucky sight to see!!! I managed a lucky photo, but the sight (and delayed sound) were unforgettable! My family were all inside and missed it, but came out after the loud rumble to see lava flowing down the side of the mountain.
I’m very VERY lucky to have seen a volcano erupt :) All the while, there were howlers howling in the distance, frogs croaking, crickets, a large spider on the leaves above my shoulder, and a pretty frog in the pond just in front of our rooms. Ah, jungle bliss :)
Cambridge in the twilit mist
I went wandering with my camera again this afternoon. For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to get some photos of Cambridge in the mist, just as it was getting dark. I had the whole afternoon when the light was better, but wanted to make things hard on myself. I guess I always preferred night photography, though I should have taken a tripod!
Panoramic Photos from Italy
I travelled around Italy in September 2006, and took lots more photos, including a few sets of photos which stitch together to form panoramic views. I took two 360 degree panoramic views, in Venice and Sienna, which are shown in Java Applets below. You can drag the view around with your mouse, or use your keyboard’s arrow keys. Pressing – or + lets you zoom out or in, although the images are displayed at 1:1 resolution already.
Venice: Panoramic view from the Campanile di San Marco, about 100m above St. Mark’s Square. Visible in the panorama are St. Mark’s Square (with its multitudinous pigeons), the Doge’s Palace, and St. Mark’s Basilica.
Click to view panorama
Siena: Panoramic view from the Campanile, about 100m above the Piazza del Campo
Click to view panorama
Milan’s Vittorio Emanuele Arcade
Click to view panorama
Verona at night
Positano
Hi-Res Panoramic Photos
During my trip to South Africa, I took several sets of photos at various stunning vistas, which I would stitch together back home. Well, now that all the other photos have been tweaked and added to CantabPhotos, I’ve started stitching some of them together (I use the open source stitching software Hugin, along with Autopano). At Blyde River Canyon, I had taken 19 photos at 8 megapixels, and once I’d cropped the resulting stitch down to the region I wanted to keep, I ended up with a 26 megapixel image, with 19 Photoshop layers. I very painstakingly checked the blending/overlap of each layer to ensure no seams were visible at all (it took me about 5 hours!). I ordered a 30″ x 14″ print of the panorama (printed and delivered next day by Photobox), and it looks absolutely stunning.
I also worked on a panorama of the Cape Town City Bowl, taken from Table Mountain, (17 photos at 8 megapixels, this time it produced a 37 megapixel image), which has stunning detail when zoomed in fully. I got that printed at 30″ x 6″ (the largest Photobox could print it), but would ideally like to get it printed to 100″ x 20″. I’ve shown a very low-res copy of it below, along with a full resolution crop of the downtown and waterfront area.
Well, I may as well add the rest of the panoramas in here as and when I stitch them together. This first one is of our first fine Capetonian sunset, from Signal Hill. The peaks are, from left to right: Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain and Lion’s Head. This panorama weighs in at hefty 55 megapixels.
Next panorama (25 megapixels): The Twelve Apostles and Camps Bay bathed in the golden light of Magic Hour – the last hour of sunlight. This was taken from La Med, where we often went to see some amazing sunsets.
I had to define the control points of the next panorama manually, as the images were too dark for AutoPano to work with. 5 photos, each one a 30 second exposure at 1600 ISO, combined to create a 12 megapixel widescreen panorama of the Milky Way.
22 Degree Moon Halo & New Court Nightscapes
With a crisp, clear night boasting a brilliant full moon, I headed out with my camera, and after 2 hours of salsa to warm me up, spent 2 hours getting rather numb taking photos, but the results were worth it.
I wouldn’t have spotted the moon-halo, had it not been for a group of people standing in the middle of John’s New Court, excitedly talking about how amazing it looked, yet having no idea what it was. Lucky for them a friendly NatSci was walking past to explain all… ;)
Here’s an explanation if you’re interested.
Here are a few quickly-processed favourites – I’ll post the rest on CantabPhotos when I get round to sorting through my huge backlog of photos.
Is Trinity a Den of Thieves?
There are hundreds of tales recounted about Cambridge, many are probably apocryphal, but they’re still juicy enough to tell people who haven’t heard them yet (or gullible tourists in a punt). While taking the photographs shown below, I noticed the inscription on the Trinity Chapel, which reminded me of one of these tales. I’ve not checked the veracity of the tale, but shall pass it on anyway…
Lying on the John’s Backs in the summer, you’ll often hear the reason why the John’s New Court Wedding cake has no clock. Allegedly, there was a race between St. John’s and Trinity to build a clock on their new courts, as they didn’t want to have clocks interfering with each other’s chimes on the hour. Trinity being Trinity, cheated and finished their clock tower in wood (while John’s built the New Court Wedding Cake with stone). The terms of the deal meant that Trinity now chimes the hour twice – the first time for Trinity, and then again immediately afterwards, for St. John’s. In return, St. John’s was able to choose which inscription should be placed on Trinity’s Chapel entrance, as long as the text came from the Bible. So a verse was chosen from the New Testament Gospels:
“Domus mea domus orationis vocabitur”
which translates as:
“My house will be called a house of prayer”
Sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it. Except the line following on from this line is:
“Vos autem fecistis eam speluncam latronum”, which translates as:
“You have turned it into a den of thieves”
So, did John’s exact their revenge for not having a clock tower? Perhaps, but the same inscription can be found on the church of Ste. Madeleine at Rennes-le-Château in France, so perhaps Trinity chose the inscription of their own free will…who knows…..