Common Sense and Whiskey

Friday Photo Quiz #36

Next week marks an important first anniversary for the tumultuous politics of this mountainous nation. Can you name it?

The answer is after the jump.

A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

Cheating Totality

Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day provoked pure envy. Seen here and credited to Babak Tafreshi, it's not only a gorgeous depiction of the sun's corona during the longest total solar eclipse of the century. Because of the location and movement of the cruise ship from which the photo was taken, APOD says the 6:39 of maximum totality was increased - aboard ship - to 6:42. They're just bragging, now.

After canceling our eclipse trip to Szechuan province's Emei Shan, which in the end was cloudy for the event itself, we showed you the live view we subscribed to from south of Shanghai, also cloudy. Turns out Mr. Eclipse, Fred Espenak, was near Shanghai, too, having led a trip to view the eclipse from Haiyan chasing 5:50 of totality. Mr. Eclipse has photographed eclipses all over the world since 1970, but it appears weather got in the way of this one. No comment yet from his web site.

The Central Asian State that Breaks Hearts

For a certain type of person, it's fun to be completely out of your element - to have nothing but your bags and your wits to get you by. All the better when you're in a place where, standing on the train platform, you can't even recognize the script on the signs.

For English speakers there is a decided difference between negotiating, say, Portuguese and Korean, and for that certain type of person, the more foreign the better. It's part of the allure. If you count yourself among those ranks (even if from your armchair), Slate has a story you'll enjoy, about Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

We're from the Junta and We're Here to Help

A verdict is expected in Aung San Suu Kyi's case tomorrow in Burma. So today, "Burma's military rulers have warned supporters of jailed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi not to protest when her trial verdict is announced," says the BBC.

Hmmm, do you suppose the junta has advance word on what they verdict might be?

(Photo of local transport near the village of Siriam in southern Burma. More in the Burma Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Myanmar Dissident Verdict on Friday (nytimes.com)
• Obama renews sanctions against Myanmar (legalulcer.com)

Fifty Photos #30

Here's a trader in the local jalaba (djellaba), on market day in a medium-sized village far up in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. See more photos like this in the Morocco Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Get top-notch professional 8x12 Glossy & Matte prints of any of the Top Fifty Prints for just $11.50 at EarthPhotos.com.

A Really Long Trip in a Really Small Space

Volunteers recently spent 105 days locked up in a mock spaceship simulating a trip to Mars.

Swedish Quirks

Nice post on the Swedish Blog titled Things That May Surprise You When Moving to Sweden, that also applies when visiting Sweden.

See the Sweden Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

HDR Lion

Here's one of the famous tree-climbing lions of the Ishasha wilderness in Uganda. Shooting in camera RAW, you can pull detail (especially clouds) out of a photo taken when it's not feasible to set up a tripod and bracket multiple photos. See an A/B of the original versus the additional detail gained by processing, after the jump.

Welcome. No, Really.

Mauritius began badly.

-    The last bag came up the thing at the airport, followed by the bag man. "C'est tout." But we were still owed a bag. I went over and conferred, showed the receipts on the back of the ticket.

Everybody talked. Bag man walked back down the carousel and a few minutes later our last bag came up with one other. Very strange.

-    This made us the last people from the entire plane through customs, where the line stretched interminable because inspectors were dumping almost everybody's bags onto the counter, including one man who brought a quarter of all the shirts in India to sell in Mauritius. They have signs and announce on the plane that drug smuggling carries the death penalty here. I guess they mean it. They wanted to poke around in my bag a little, looking at the film cannisters and camera and asking questions, but it wasn't a scary thing, just irritating. So now we'd invested an hour in Mauritius and so far just cleared customs.

-    We had 2000 Rupees from India left over and not a bank in this airport (there's two) would buy 'em. Didn't want 'em. Indian Rupees are not money here.

-    Hertz ain't got no cars for rent.

-    Europcar does, but I can't rent one here. This is crazy, but if you don't have a reservation when you fly in, you can't take possession of a car at the airport. You have to go to a hotel or another car rental office. This is so taxis can get at least one fare from you, and I am not kidding. Our hotel was 50 kilometers across the island, so we struck a deal with the Europcar man: We'd get a cab to some place called Shandrani, at four kilometers the closest hotel, and he'd bring a car over.

-    At the end of the six dollar cab ride, a keen-eyed bellman whisked our bags in the direction of the Shandrani front desk, while Europcar man was nowhere in sight. Sigh.

Finally he showed up and we had a seat in the open air lobby. "I have no right to do business here," Mr. Europcar announced.

He ran an Amex draft and filled in 15,000 RM (nearly $1000) and wanted me to sign "in case you make an accident." Plus 1080 RM/day times three days plus 12.5% government tax. I didn't sign that, or any other as it turned out, but the long and short of it was we got ourselves a white Daihatsu Charade with no a/c. Now the Shandrani porter, who'd been camping on our bags, rolled 'em out to the Charade, staking a claim for his tip.

Gee, we'd only been in Mauritius a couple of hours and already we'd rented a car!

From the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey by Bill Murray.

(Photo of Grand Baie, Mauritius. See more photos in the Mauritius Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Not Vacationing in a City Under Siege

Until three weeks ago we were scheduled to be in China this month. Just before we'd have left, we canceled based on China's H1N1 flu quarantine policy. If we'd gone - and not been quarantined - how would things be going?

First we were due atop Emei Shan, a mountain south of Chengdu, to view the longest total solar eclipse of the century. Alas, that was not to be. Emei Shan, and much of the entire Chinese industrial heartland where the eclipse would have been visible, was all socked in with rain and clouds.

Tough as that was, at least that was only one of our three weeks. But wait. Whoops - our next stop was deadly-race-riot-plagued Urumqi. Then Kashgar. Here's pictures of Urumqi today (thanks to Fallows). and the FT reported in its Saturday weekend edition, "Security gets stricter west and south of Urumqi, with Kucha and Kashgar virtually under siege. Hundreds of police with machine guns recently guarded the main square in front of the Id Kah mosque in Kashgar."

It just might be that a photo journey through far western China, poking my camera lens at anything that moves, the way I do, might not have been the best idea just now.

(Photo from Alastair Thornton in The Interpreter blog.)

(See more photography from China at EarthPhotos.com.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• China Fears Ethnic Strife Could Agitate Uighur Oasis (nytimes.com)
• The longest solar eclipse of the century (makezine.com)

HDR Uganda

Working on HDR techniques today. Here's a banana man in rural Uganda. See more photography from Uganda in the Uganda Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And for comparison, see both the HDR and the non-HDR versions of this photo side by side, HDR first, after the jump.

"Don't You FYROM Me!"

We've visited all the "FYR's," former Yugoslav republics, except Macedonia, and have posted photos in the Former Yugoslavia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. There are obviously big challenges in the Balkans and some FYR's have more challenges than others. Macedonia has to fight one battle none of the others do - about its name.

Friday Photo Quiz #35

Big city today. Two clues: It's a capital city, and this country borrows the currency of another to use as its own. Can you name it?

The answer is after the jump.

A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

Technology Makes Our Lives Better

You could see this coming from the very beginning.

Now you're going to need one of these, a "special alloy sleeve... designed to shield RFID signals and protect a single passport embedded with a wireless radio frequency chip."

In an article titled  What a shock: Your e-passport isn’t secure after all, the web site Upgrade: Travel Better explains that "the U.S. State Department is now urging travelers to keep their RFID-chip enabled passports in “radio-opaque sleeves” to protect owners from having their information skimmed by unauthorized readers within a 30-foot range."

That'd be the same State Department that made "earlier claims that e-passports are 'totally secure'.”

Panorama Photography

Our friend Andy Hayes' interview with Panorama photographer Willie Kaemena has shown me a terrific site called 360Cities.net. It hosts, in its words, "thousands of high-resolution, interactive panorama images from around the world." And there's a tutorial on how to get started with panorama photography. It's worth a look.

Andy, incidentally, has been a guest contributor to CS&W, here. He's a writer and photographer based in Edinburgh. His blog is Sharing Experiences.

Not Exactly Your Luxury Train....

Next month Common Sense and Whiskey will review a trans-continental rail journey. We've booked ourselves on the Ghan, a two-day-plus trip from Darwin, at the top of Australia, through the "Red Center" all the way down to Adelaide in the south.

We're hoping for an altogether nicer experience than it looks like the Kursk train station in Moscow is these days (photo). Not exactly wheelchair friendly, is it?

Don't know if this is temporary construction or just the state of the Kursk station. To be fair, our experience on the Trans-Siberian was altogether nicer than this looks.

More photos of Kursk station like this one are posted on English Russia.

See photography from Russia in the Russia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

(Photo from English Russia.)

Eclipsed by Clouds

Nothing is quite so forlorn as eclipse photographers all turned out, gear at the ready, with nothing but clouds to photograph. The skies were not kind across much of Asia for yesterday's longest eclipse of the century.

From Gujarat in western India, where the Times of India headlined Weatherman predicts heavy rain today, through Tibet, where the photo at left was taken at the Potala in Lhasa (photo via Xinhua), right on through to Shanghai, gaps in the clouds were the exception.

Emei Shan, the 10,167 foot (3099 meter) peak south of Chengdu where our abortive eclipse trip would have taken us, showed solid clouds on radar. Danwei has a video that shows the sun and moon in and out of clouds at Wuhan, east of Emei Shan.

The BBC has a 2-1/2 minute video compilation, and also reports that a woman was killed in a stampede on the Ganges river bank in Varanasi, and that thick smog in Beijing (from which the eclipse was only partial) blotted out the sky.

Boston.com also has photos.

The web site eclipse-tv.com offered live images from near Shanghai for $14. We subscribed. After the jump, see a screen grab of the sky shortly after totality from their feed.

Total Solar Eclipse: It's Game Day

Everybody should be just about in place for the longest eclipse of the century, which begins in under twelve hours. Weather prospects are not so good across much of China, with this forecast showing rain likely for Emei Shan and this cloud map showing Hangzhou socked in at the time I write this.

Since we reluctantly decided not to go to China we've found this web site offering a live HD feed from Yangshan Island off Shanghai for $14. Their last report said the weather was okay. Good luck to everybody on the center line with a camera!

(Photo of 11 August, 1999 eclipse as seen from Lake Balaton, Hungary from EarthPhotos.com.)

Fifty Photos: #29

This not-so-little guy was photographed in a car park in rural South Africa. See more in the South Africa Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Get top-notch professional 8x12 Glossy & Matte prints of any of the Top Fifty Prints for just $11.50 at EarthPhotos.com.

HDR Resources

Thanks to Pete Carr and his book HDR Photography Photo Workshop, here's a list of HDR Photographers whose work you can peruse on the web:

Pete Carr, Daniel Cheong, Chris Coleman, Robert Correll, David Herreman, John Mueller, David J. Nightingale, Ruben Seabra, Peter Van Allen.

Also see the interview that appeared here on Common Sense and Whiskey with Ferrell McCullogh, author of the book, The Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Digital Photography. See some of Ferrell's work here on Flickr, and read Ferrell's blog Before the Coffee.

Pete Carr's book also lists a few HDR forums:

Photoworkshop.com, Talk Photography, Flickr HDR Group, Flickr Photomatix Group

(Photo of a street in the old town, Gamlastan, in Stockholm from the Sweden Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)