Shot at sunrise from the lower level of the Galata Bridge toward Beyoglu as nine exposures, processed as an HDR in Photomatix, finished in Photoshop. Texture and a spin through Pixel Bender to make it like an oil painting. Click to see it bigger. And there are currently 357 more photos from Turkey here.
Now that spring has arrived here in the southeast U.S., Chernobyl looks like a cold and forbidding place. It was a cold and forbidding place, matter of fact.
Here are a few HDR photos from last month's travel. Click them to make them
bigger. There are 35 photos posted so far to this gallery at EarthPhotos.com. One or two more go up most days.
First is the gymnasium at the Palace of Culture in Pripyat, Ukraine. Pripyat was the town built specifically to service the Chernobyl nuclear power complex. At the time it was evacuated, it held some 45,000 scientists, engineers and their families. The average age was just 26.
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Same building, just on the central square, along with a supermarket, government buildings, a restaurant and a hotel. The rug says "CCCP 60," to commemorate the USSR's 60th anniversary, which was a little over three years before the accident.
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The Great Patriotic War Museum in Kyiv is just about all in Ukrainian, with just little laminated cards to read in English, but much of the story being told is visual, anyway. The lands between Berlin and Moscow had it tough. They were flattened from one direction by the Germans, then from the other by the Russians. This monument is in an underground walkway outside the museum.
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There's a restaurant atop the Legacy Ottoman Hotel, just above the Eminonu ferries, with this fine view of the Golden Horn. Arrive about 5:00, as we did, and you have the whole place to yourself.
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There's a warren of alleyways between the indoor part of the Grand Bazaar and the waterfront. Here, men line up for a little work. Somebody dropped off there bundles of merchandise, and these guys are carrying them who knows where.
Here's Miraflores Beach in Lima, Peru:
It's not all that beautiful, really, and this time of year it's almost always overcast. Zoom in on the shoreline down there though, and you get abstract art:
More HDRs here. Here's one more HDR while we're here, an empty city street in the San Isidro district of Lima:
Processed in Photomatix and Photoshop.
Click this photo to make it much bigger. These statues on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) are called moai. They stand on ahus, stone platforms, some of which are ossuaries. The moai on the right in this photo is Ahu Ko Te Riku. Farther out is Ahu Vai Uri and in the distance, that's the island's only town, Hanga Roa.
This photo is an HDR created with Photomatix, Nik filters and Photoshop CS5. It's overlaid with a texture. See more photos from Easter Island here and more HDRs here.
Three more fancied-up moais from Easter Island:
Top, the quarry at Rano Raraku, where these guys were carved out. It's a long way and a lot of effort to finally stand in this quarry, but if you ever make the trip, it feels like pretty much no other place. Too many mysteries. How did they move these guys all over the island with no modern tools? Why did they stop as if in mid-hammer blow, put down their things and walk away, leaving dozens and dozens of these guys at the quarry? And what happened to cause the downfall of Rapa Nui in the first place?
Middle, This is one lone guy standing by himself near Ahu Tongariki, the biggest single collection of standing moai on the island. It's as if he just didn't get along with the rest of the gang. The long ahu is sort of behind and to the right of this shot, and looking away from them like this makes for a pretty desolate scene, don't you think?
Bottom, Ahu Ko Te Riku, near Hanga Roa town. This fellow's eyes are replicas. He's the only moai with eyes, and it's to demonstrate how much more imposing (creepy?) the moais all must have looked back when they all had eyes. There is one moai fragment with its original eyes in the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum near Hanga Roa.
All are HDRs processed in Photomatix and CS5 using Nik plug-ins. The top two are texturized. The texture in the middle photo was shot on the same trip, in Lima. Click them to make them bigger. There are 50-something photos in the Easter Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
These guys were at work at a glass factory along the boardwalk in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when we walked by.
Here, after re-exposing a single RAW photo several times in Adobe Bridge and re-combining them in Photomatix Pro, we're using a Nik Software duplex filter and lots of layers and masks in Photoshop CS5. Shot with a Nikon D-700. Click it to make it quite a bit bigger, and see more HDRs here, and more from Canada here.
The Notre Dame Cathedral, Montreal, Quebec, shot with a Nikon D-700 and processed in Photomatix and Photoshop, most using Nik plug-ins. Click to enlarge. 421 more HDRs here.
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:
There's been a little time to process some of the photos we brought back from Nova Scotia. Here are five: 1. The waterfront at Halifax. 2. The lighthouse at Peggy's Cove. 3. Boat, Peggy's Cove. 4 & 5 are two treatments of another boat at Peggy's Cove.
All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop using Nik Software. Click 'em to make them bigger. The texture in photo number five comes from SkeletalMess with thanks. More HDRs here.
After a week in Quebec and Nova Scotia, it's fun to play with some fresh photos. As usual, industrial stuff and machinery lend themselves well to the HDR treatment, so that's where we start. From the top, a big view of the Viterra agri-products facility along the St. Lawrence River outside Montreal and then a closer view of two cranes you can see in the long shot. Then two shots of the Jacques Cartier bridge, opened in 1930, connecting Ile de Montreal to the shore. The bottom photo is looking up from underneath.
All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here.
Tomorrow CS&W will have a little story about Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Both Labor Day in the U.S. (the first Monday in September) and the International Worker's Day (or May Day, May 1st) seem to have sprung up almost simultaneously in the 1880s. The U.S. Department of Labor says that the first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882.
The movement in Canada may have been a little out in front of the U.S.:
"Labor unions existed in Canada in the early 1800s but legislation was adopted to make it illegal for workers to form unions.... At the beginning of May, thousands of workers and their families would march peacefully through the city streets into the parks where they would enjoy picnics, and listen to speakers talking about working together to force employers to reduce working hours.... In 1872, the Canadian government changed the law so it was no longer illegal to be a member of a trade union."
Martyred Communist Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the Americans were also behind May Day:
"The happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia" in 1856, she wrote, and "The first to follow the example of the Australian workers were the Americans. In 1886 they decided that May 1 should be the day of universal work stoppage."
Ms. Luxemburg never got round to how Labor Day moved from May to September, and it's a good question, since today some 80 countries celebrate Worker's Day on May 1st. Here is Britannica's answer:
"In 1889 an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions declared the date of May 1 as Workers’ Day to commemorate the Haymarket Riot in Chicago (1886). Five years later, U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland, uneasy with the socialist origins of Workers’ Day, signed legislation to make Labor Day—already held in some states on the first Monday of September—the official U.S. holiday in commemoration of workers. Canada followed suit not long afterward."
So, both Americans and Canadians celebrated a holiday with a day off last weekend. Montrealers were out in unusually warm weather for a street festival in Old Montreal. Here are a few HDRs. Click them to make them bigger:
All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here.
The Sydney Opera House from vantage points you don't usually see. Both shots taken across the harbour at the Taronga Zoo in the suburb of Mosman.
All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here, and more from Sydney and the zoo (koalas and stuff) in the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
The cheetah and the grasshopper live in South Africa, the baboon and flamingoes are from from the Tierpark Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich, Germany and the gorilla at bottom lives in Parc National des Volcans, Rwanda. More gorilla photos here. All processed in Photomatix and Photoshop. Click 'em to make them bigger. More HDRs here.
An uncommon domestic photo - at least here on CS&W - from back in March, en route to Hanava. You have to stay up pretty late to see South Beach in Miami this deserted. Or have a hotel room with this view. Which was really, really loud until it got late.
On the other hand, I can heartily recommend Jerry's pastrami. Click the photo to make it bigger.
Multiple exposures with a Nikon D700, finished in Photoshop with Nik filters. The photos from Cuba are here.
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.
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.
There were so many people walking the streets of Vilnius, Lithuania on a Saturday in summer, most of them visitors like us, that there was almost no point in taking photos, unless you like loud, irritating children or paunchy retirees in shorts with those skinny little white legs, or drunken single men on a weekend binge trip in your pictures.
But if they were all out living it up on Saturday afternoon, maybe they'd be sleeping it off on Sunday? Sure enough. These first three are the streets of Vilnius, waiting for the sun to come up over the buildings on a Sunday morning.
These next two are the rooftops of Tallinn, Estonia. I first visited Tallinn almost twenty years ago, and it couldn't have felt more Communist-run down. Nowadays you just flit over on the fast boat from Helsinki and because of the Schengen agreement, there's not even any pass control. Which has the Finns lamenting that "Every fifth crime in Helsinki is committed by foreigners." And that "Estonians committed the most crimes of any national group." The nicest hotel in town twenty years ago was looking a little tired this last visit. Tallinn has a cute litle old town, though.
After their entanglement with the Soviet Union, such is the Baltic states' longing to integrate with Europe that Latvia still plans to adopt the Euro in 2014 (Estonia already has) even if some say now is the worst possible time.
Riga, the capital of Latvia, is the biggest Baltic capital and it has a certain bustle that the others can't muster. Except in its old town. Which really does feel old. First a typical alleyway, then the imposing doors of Riga Cathedral, and a little walkway under and behind the cathedral.
These photos were all taken with Nikon cameras, processed in Photomatix and Photoshop with Nik software. See the HDR Gallery for 388 HDR photos, and the Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.
Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.
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