Common Sense and Whiskey

Ten Places of Worship - Wednesday HDRs

Enjoy these HDRs of churches in Ethiopia, Italy, Lithuania, Panama, Cuba, Latvia and on St. Helena Island. Click any of them to make them much bigger. There are almost 400 more HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

The first two are from St. James Church, the oldest Anglican church in the southern hemisphere, St. Helena Island, South Atlantic Ocean:

These next two are from the Riga Cathedral, Riga, Latvia:

Here is the Catedral de la Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada de La Habana, Havana, Cuba:

World Transport - Wednesday HDRs

 

 Taken from the train platform in Spiez, a little town on the Thunersee, between Interlaken and Thun, in Switzerland.

 The mercado in Addia Ababa, Ethiopia. They call it the world's largest outdoor market and it really is huge. It's blocks and blocks and blocks both long and wide.

 Out in the countryside in St. Helena, a British territory in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Kind of frozen in time.

 Along the side of the road in rural Uganda.

Fremantle, the port near Perth, on Australia's Indian Ocean coast.

All these HDRs come from Nikon cameras and were processed in Photomatix with Nik filters, and finished in Photoshop CS4 & CS5. There are currently 390 HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Ethiopian Wednesday HDRs - Churches

 

 

 

Don't know why, but photography from some places seems to lend itself to HDR conversion better than others. Could be the photographer's inspiration. Some of the best HDR work I think I've done comes from Vietnam (Here are a few), a place I love, and I really liked Addis Ababa and the Ethiopian people a lot more than I'd expected to. So maybe that's it.

The top photo is from St. Mary's Church on Mt. Entoto, outside Addis. In the middle are worshippers at Trinity Ethiopian Orthodox church in Addis, and at the bottom we're back on Mt. Entoto. Click them to make them bigger. All these were shot with Nikon gear, converted in Photomatix and finished in Photoshop with Nik filters.

There are 390 photos in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Ethiopian Street Life - Wednesday HDRs

HDRs from a trip to the Mercado open air market in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. All shot with a Nikon D-700, processed with PhotoMatix, Nik filters and Photoshop CS5. Click 'em to make them much bigger. And see 360 more HDR photos here, at EarthPhotos.com.

Two More Wednesday HDRs from Ethiopia

The basics here are similar to last week's two Ethiopian photos. Each is a single image re-exposed at +2, +1, 0, -1 and -2 EV and then combined in Photomatix, tweaked in Photoshop Camera RAW and finished in Photoshop CS5.The top photo this week used a series of blur layers and the Nik Software Duplex plug-in, and the bottom used a series of Stylize -> Find Edges layers in CS5. Click 'em to make 'em much bigger.

There are 300+ more HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Wednesday HDRs: Two from Ethiopia

Both of these are newly posted on EarthPhotos.com. They're of worshippers at St. Mary's Church on Mt. Entoto, near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Click them to make them much bigger.

Each is a single image re-exposed at +2, +1, 0, -1 and -2 EV and then combined in Photomatix, tweaked in Photoshop Camera RAW and finished in Photoshop CS5. There are 322 more HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Ethiopian Airlines Crash Update

To follow up on a previous post, no one else suggests terrorism in the Ethiopian Airlines crash off Beirut on 25 January - only DebkaFile. 

And that's good, because doggone it, we want Ethiopian Airlines to do well. There just aren't that many African airlines to root for. There's South African, obviously, for the long haul, but suppose you're not going all the way to the far end of Africa. With service to 35 African cities, Ethiopian provides the only way in to some places other than a much more seat-of-the-pants national carrier.

And consider a one way itinerary between Paris and Libreville, Gabon, randomly chosen for 1 April, and priced just now. The only European airline going is Air France, priced at $4418. Ethiopian, same day via Addis, quotes $838.57 (quoted as 616.05 Euros). FIVE TIMES the price and a couple hundred dollars besides.

Ethiopian has got the capitals of countries across the Sahel covered, and destinations on the east and west of Africa, warts and all.

*****

Meanwhile, back at the crash, the AP reports that "Relatives of those killed aboard an Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed into the Mediterranean off Lebanon in January are planning to file a multimillion dollar lawsuit against American plane manufacturer Boeing." And at a press conference, Girma Wake, CEO of Ethiopian Airlines, "accused Lebanese officials of providing information that was unfounded and misleading concerning the ET409 accident even before the findings of the investigation have been announced," says AddisFortune.

(Photo of Bole International Airport, Addis Ababa, from the Ethiopia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

About That Ethiopian Airlines Flight

So far, nobody mainstream is buying into the Israeli web site Debkafile's report that Ethiopian Airline crash off Beirut was an act of Al-Qaeda terror. Search "ethiopian airlines terrorism al qaeda" and you'll find no one but DebkaFile and mostly conservative bloggers who echo the story.

Debkafile cites "western security agencies in the middle east" as suspecting al Qaeda

"planners picked on the Ethiopian flight for more than one reason apart from the date: They had been tipped off that a group of French undercover agents, including Maria Sanchez Pietton, wife of the French ambassador to Beirut, and top Hizballah operatives, including secretary general Hassan Nasrallah, would be aboard.

Mme Pietton lost her life in the crash, while the Hizballah travelers were saved by switching to another flight at the last minute."

Explosive charges (if I may), but Debkafile can tend to the hysterical. Wikipedia quotes Yediot Achronot's investigative reporter Ronen Bergman writing that "the site relies on information from sources with an agenda, such as neo-conservative elements of the US Republican Party, "whose worldview is that the situation is bad and is only going to get worse," and that Israeli intelligence officials do not consider even 10 percent of the site's content to be reliable."

Photo from the Ethiopia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

New Year Travel Travails

Ethiopian Airlines fooled us. Last time on board it hadn't looked like an African airline. Everything worked and the plane was relatively new.

This time, boarding time of 0:05 on New Years Eve in Rome had already been moved to 1:00 on the monitors by the time we arrived at the closed, shank end of some dark terminal at FCO where the business lounge was manned (womaned) by a disinterested gum-popping young woman and a man behind a bar with old finger food under plastic. And as always, there was no information (it eventually turned out the delay had been in Stockholm where the plane had to be de-iced).

Everybody has a travel horror story, Bub. Live with it.

Yeah, but I can tell it.

By the time they loaded us up, after 1:00 we knew we were... in an unfortunate situation. A tight connection in Addis Ababa was already blown. And here was a tatty old 757 with torn upholstery in which neither the overhead entertainment system (forget about seatback) nor the reading lights, nor a few of the sixteen seats in "Cloud Nine" worked. So we just slept.

Boarding time for our flight from Addis to Johannesburg was 8:05, our boarding cards told us, and it was an hour past that as we flew into Addis. The prospects, best we could figure, were for a night in Addis with a lost hotel room at JNB and a missed flight to Namibia the next morning (which doesn't operate every day) or at best a number of hours in the Cloud Nine lounge before a routing through Nairobi.

And then, as they opened the door on the tarmac at Addis, the smiling man at the bottom of the stairs instructed us onto this minibus, directly across the tarmac to a waiting 737 and off to JNB. They'd held the flight for over an hour. Delightful. Even the torn upholstery looked better.

Except, naturally, that they left our bags in Addis. So the rest of the day we worked the phones from the U.S. to Namibia with the added challenge that it's a holiday, and this morning we've just missed that flight to Walvis Bay anyway, on the promise that those bags are flying in even now. There is no flight to Walvis Bay before our ship leaves on Sunday. Right now it looks like we'll fly to Windhoek, pick up a car from Avis and drive out to the coast.

We'll see.

Elsewhere on the internets...

The University at Albany, New York, is using material from EarthPhotos.com to illustrate coverage of a trip to Ethiopia this summer by a group of their School of Social Welfare students. The article documents their trip to St. Mary's church on Mt. Entoto with this photo from EarthPhotos.com.

Thanks!

(See more photos in the Ethiopia Gallery and the Worship Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)