Common Sense and Whiskey

EarthPhotos.com Announces Digital Downloads

Today I'm happy to announce Digital Downloads on EarthPhotos.com. Just about all of the 18,691 photos on EarthPhotos may now be downloaded immediately. Two sizes are on offer.

You can buy a Web Size image, roughly 640x480 pixels in size, or 0.3 megapixels. This is suitable for web sharing on social sites like Facebook. Or you can buy a 1Mpix image, roughly 1 megapixel in size. These photos are for your personal, and not commercial use (Read Personal License). The 1 Mpix download is roughly 816x1224 pixels, about big enough to print an 8x12.

And we want to help with your commercial application. We're proud of our lion photo in Afar Magazine. It remains the Most Popular Photo on EarthPhotos.com, as voted by users. A couple of weeks back, we placed a photo on a kids' show for German TV. All these commercial applications are different, so please talk with us about what you need.

 

Weekend Fun

Enjoy a few photos for the weekend from the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Intermittent Technical Problems Today at EarthPhotos.com

Approximately 3:00 p.m. eastern U.S. time today, Friday 3 April, 2009, EarthPhotos.com, hosted by Smugmug, which in turn contracts with Amazon.com for cloud memory, appears to be affected by the DDOS problems that have afflicted Amazon.com over the past couple of days. Service at EarthPhotos.com may be intermittent, and we apologize.

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• DDoS attacks hit major web services - Securecomputing.net.au (domainmacher.com)

New "Most Popular" Photo

There's a newly voted Most Popular photo on EarthPhotos.com. It's cave dwellings in Cappadoccia, near the Turkish town of Goreme.

EarthPhotos.com has nearly ten thousand photos from all over the planet, arranged by country and in categories, like Cities, People and Transportation. You can give any photo on the site a thumbs up or thumbs down by selecting it as the main photo on the page. Then move your mouse over it and clickable voting icons appear. Photos are ranked by popularity in the Most Popular Gallery.

New "Most Popular" Photo

There's a newly voted Most Popular photo on EarthPhotos.com this morning. It's a meadow in summertime near the Finnish town of Varkaus.

EarthPhotos.com has nearly ten thousand photos from all over the planet, arranged by country and in categories, like Cities, People and Transportation. You can give any photo on the site a thumbs up or thumbs down by selecting it as the main photo on the page. Then move your mouse over it and clickable voting icons appear. Photos are ranked by popularity in the Most Popular Gallery.

Photo Quiz

This photo could have been taken anywhere from approximately Mauritania in the west, all the way east to maybe Pakistan. Care to take a guess where this is? Answer after the jump.

New "Most Popular" Photo on EarthPhotos.com

Perhaps because of my recent post here on the Torres del Payne National Park in Chilean Patagonia as a travel destination, this guanaco has risen to the top of the "Most Popular" gallery on our photo website, EarthPhotos.com.

As you browse through the galleries there, if you mouse over any currently displayed photo you'll be presented with a chance to vote "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." Have a look around the galleries and please weigh in!

EarthPhotos.com Picture of the Day

Good morning. This photo, of a woman carrying firewood to market on Mt. Entoto, Ethiopia, is currently voted Most Popular on EarthPhotos.com. It's the first photo voted number one from our August photo shoots in Europe, Africa and the Arabian peninsula. This photo is in the new EarthPhotos.com Ethiopia Gallery.

A vote (mouse over the photo and click thumbs up or thumbs down) on any photo on EarthPhotos.com affects that photo's ranking in the Most Popular Gallery on EarthPhotos.com. Drop by and be opinionated!

Around the Web Over the Weekend

Good morning.

At Jaunted, a man changes his name to avoid TSA watch list hassles.

In light of the current Delta Airlines/Amex 20% bonus promotion we wrote about last week, at View from the Wing, a discussion of the merits of using Delta Skymiles for Singapore Airlines rewards.

A nicely evocative, atmospheric bit of travel writing on IHT's Globespotters about breaking the Ramadan fast in Paris.

Photocritic talks about what future historians might learn from the photos you take today.

And at EarthPhotos.com this morning, from our swing through Africa last month, we have up the first, uncaptioned photos in our new, far-from-complete Uganda gallery:

CS&W Hits the Road

Common Sense and Whiskey will turn into a little more of a travelogue over the next three weeks. We've created this blog because of our abiding love of international travel, and it's time to go out and do some.

Common Sense and Whiskey is also meant to complement our major work, EarthPhotos.com, where we keep (and encourage you to buy) photos of eighty-some countries around the world. We plan to add at least four new countries to the list on our return.

We'll start out at our summer cabin in Finland this weekend, then sail across the mouth of the Gulf of Bothnia to Stockholm, in order to catch a flight to Addia Ababa (can you think of two cities connected by air that are more at cultural antipodes?). From Ethiopia we'll travel in Uganda and spend two days gorilla trekking in the Parc National des Volcans in Rwanda. After that it's a few days at the beach in Muscat, Oman before a hop up to Dubai to catch the crisp 14 hour 55 minute Delta non-stop back to Atlanta.

We'll be posting photos we're especially proud of here and/or on EarthPhotos.com, and we'll probably have a random thing or two to say along the way. Due to long transits and  a week in the bush in Africa without the internet, there will be gaps in posts during August. If you click on the RSS logo on the top left of the blog to subscribe to an RSS Feed, that'll let you know when we get close enough to  the internets to post a photo or two.

Cheers for now!

"We do not approve of the use of pictures to pass judgment on air quality ..."

So says Du Shaozhong of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, in a USA Today article titled Hong Kong sets new pollution record as horses arrive (Hong Kong is the Olympic Equestrian venue). Here's a web cam view of the Hong Kong waterfront today, from the Hong Kong Tourism Authority:

And here's sunset across Victoria Harbor last time we were there, last  December/January:

Find more from Hong Kong and all over China in EarthPhotos.com's China gallery.

Photography in Northern Latitudes

Vivid northern light presents opportunities for the photographer that you just don't find around the farm in Georgia, USA. We're looking forward to photo ops in Finland, where we'll be all next week. These photos, clockwise from top left, were taken at our cabin in Finland, in a general store in Siberia, in the harbor at Bergen, Norway  and on a midsummer midnight cruise in Greenland.

Click the links to their country galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

Weekend Favorites

A little weekend fun: Visit EarthPhotos.com's Favorites gallery and enjoy the 100 top photos as voted everyday by visitors to the site. While you're there, nominate your favorite from the 7500-odd photos from all around the planet.

This former #1 is from Cappadoccia, Turkey, and can be found in EarthPhotos.com's Turkey and Architecture galleries.

EarthPhotos - Favorites

Vote for your favorite photo on EarthPhotos.com. This is #1 at the moment. It was taken on a midnight cruise on Disko Bay, Greenland, in the month of June. A viewer writes, "A wonderous photo of an environment I rarely get to see, beautiful location, absolutely a perfect picture." See the recently updated Greenland gallery on EarthPhotos.com.

EP - POD

Vote for the Picture of the Day on EarthPhotos.com. Here's today's #1. It's a lovely December sunset over Likoma Island, Malawi. See lots more pictures in the EarthPhotos.com Nature and Malawi galleries, and for more of Africa choose individual countries or try Animals and Wildlife.

Eclipse Photography - Opportunities

A blog post from The Other End of China (above photo from their site) reminds us there's a total eclipse coming up in just twenty days. In case you'll be in Novosibirsk, northern China or nearby, here's a sight survey.

A total solar eclipse is an utterly indescribable event. After all the building anticipation, the usually extensive logistics and elaborate preparation, you'll spend the moments preceding the onset of totality breathless, and as the shadow of the moon races across the surface of the earth you'll feel so tiny, tiny small and insignificant, and awed at the same time, in a way you never, ever have before.

We've had the profound privilege of seeing two: the 11 August, 1999, eclipse, which we viewed at Lake Balaton, Hungary, and the 29 March, 2006 eclipse which we viewed near Nevsehir, Turkey. And with a little luck, we'll be on hand for the big one, Wednesday, 22 July next year. There will not be a longer eclipse until 13 June, 2132.

Which is a profound opportunity for the photographer.

Our Sister Site: Earthphotos.com

Our photo web site, EarthPhotos.com, currently contains photos from 82 countries and territories, with at least six more due by fall. We also list photos by the following categories: Landscapes, People, Architecture and Design, Animals and Wildlife, Cities and Urban Life, Worship, Transport, Markets, Food and Drink, Signs, Nature, Birds, Monks, and Rural Life. Please spend some time there!

We hope to add a few new categories before the end of the year. Please send us your ideas via Comments or email. The only one we're sure of so far is a new category called "Work."

The Mekong River, and a photo journey: Vietnam from Cambodia to China

Jaunted posts  about a trip along the Mekong River from Phnom Penh to Chau Doc, Vietnam. CS&W has posted on Cambodia before, and once visited Chau Doc, a sprawling Mekong Delta river town on the Vietnam/Cambodia border.

Starting here on the Cambodian border at the south end of the country, let's take a photo tour right on up to the Chinese border.

Storing Your Files

Before digital SLRs, once you shot a roll of film you never knew quite what to do with it. You'd guard it like your passport in the hotel safe, and keep it warm and dry. On longer or more involved trips you didn't want to pass it through too many airport x-ray machines.

There was a time we packed up rolls of film from several countries and mailed them home to the U.S. from Bangkok, because we had two months of airports in front of us. Once in Cape Town, we developed all of our slides from Zambia only to find that the slide mounts they used in South Africa were too fat to fit U.S. Kodak slide carousels.

Traveling these digital days, we make sure to have every image in two places. At first we'd keep them in the laptop and burn a cd copy. Now we keep everything on the laptop and keep a copy in the stylin' Lacie Rugged  mobile hard drive.

Nowadays though, the cards themselves are big enough to maybe hold your whole trip. You can buy a 16 gig card for under two hundred  bucks.

But is that smart?

Mike Fox's post, Storing Digital Media talks sensibly about practical issues like, for example, carrying two eight gig cards versus one new sixteen gig card.

Eats!

Food tourism has spawned its own book, academic studies and even an apparently not too successful blog. A culinary trip to Nigeria might be a dish too far, but you've got to give them credit for trying.

On our most recent stay at the (stylish, venerable, legendary - you pick) Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, we spent a morning in the kitchen, divining the differences between Hanoi and Saigon spring rolls, incorporating banana flowers into entrees and learning to carve fruit that pretty Asian way.

Before the kitchen session, everybody hopped a cyclo to the local market to go over the finer points of choosing Asian ingredients. You could buy these dogs there but the ladies told us, a touch disdainfully, that only men eat them, when they are drinking beer.

There are nearly four hundred pictures (including these dogs) from all over Vietnam in the Vietnam gallery on EarthPhotos.com.