Deve’s Blog

Came back from the trip on Sunday afternoon… tired but satisfied…

A few notes, before a (I hope) future travel diary…

Bolivia has some breathtaking landscapes; the three days on 4WD on the Salt Flats and the desert were marvellous, albeit long, very tiring and very cold (outside, in the night, it went down to -20°C!!!). The cities (La Paz and Sucre) didn’t strike me as much, but they can be fascinating in their own way and deserve a visit. I’d have been quite curious to visit Potosì and the silver mines, as we were supposed to do according to our itinerary, but unfortunately we ran into strikes in the whole Potosì region, so the city was actually locked down for two or three weeks, with miners throwing dynamite and tourists stuck in the city… Luckily our guide Alex managed to avoid all that, even though the unplanned trip was quite intense: 4WD for 8 hours in the night, than 3 hours and a damned bus without heating, at 4.30 in the morning, and finally a 40 minutes flight (which is quite ironic…) from La Paz to Sucre…
Santa Cruz, still in Bolivia, was instead just a “stop” towards Brazil: the city itself has very little to offer to tourists, although it was interesting to see the difference in the population, mostly of Spanish descendence, if compared for example to La Paz, with a lot of Aymara descendents…

All the stops in Brazil were a pleasant surprise… the Pantanal, where observing animals and birds is really very easy, Bonito, where I tried snorkelling in a river that I had no idea could be so crystal clear, and where I tried some underwater photography thanks to a special plastic bag… and Iguazu Falls, the highlight of the trip for me, a wonder of nature that I believe is really unique (by the way: if you want to vote for the New 7 Wonders of Nature, you MUST vote for Iguazu…). And then Paraty, a colonial village on the coast, the beautiful Ilha Grande with the amazing Lopez Mendez beach…
Rio, instead, didn’t strike me that much… the statue of Christ the Redeemer is way overrated, the Sambodromo is a mass of cement which it’s pointless to visit if it’s not the Carnival, while the Sugarloaf at sunset was probably the best attraction of the city for me; Copacabana and Ipanema are iconic, but not so special… anyway I appreciated the atmosphere, even if in some parts of the city you didn’t really feel very safe…

Anyway it was a beautiful trip, which certainly leaves me with the desire to visit also the North of huge Brazil, besides the taste of South I got…

At the end of the holiday, the count of photos and videos that I took with my two cameras got to 3694… well, many are “safety shots”, and in some occasions I shot long sequences to create panoramic pictures, so the number of “good” pictures will certainly drop significantly… I’ll try to be selective!
In the meantime I made a first round of selection, about 1000 pics and movies that I’ve already put on Flickr here… enjoy…

P.S. I must specify that I believe that no picture or movie will ever be able to do justice to what Iguazu is…

And finally it’s time for holidays again! And finally they’re quite generous, a whole month! And finally it’s time to travel again!

As usual, no typical destinations for me, otherwise you’d get bored… 25 days from La Paz (Bolivia) to Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)! And then two extra days in Rio… and two days of travel… and that’s how to spend 29 days of August!

I have to say the GAP website seems to always pull out the right trip at the right moment… Only two weeks to use, starting from Chicago? Here’s Peru for you… I have to book at the last minute for a week around New Year’s Eve? Cuba! No holidays until October? No problem, China! Another New Year’s Eve without much advance notice? Let’s say Egypt…
And this year the choice fell upon this tour, which seems really amazing (and I think it will be tiring in the same measure… that’s what the two days in Rio are for, and I see myself lying on Ipanema’s beach all day long…).

Well, I’m leaving tomorrow at 8 am, Milan-Madrid-Sao Paulo, then I’ll have to change airline and take my last flight to La Paz, where I’ll land at… 4000 metres above sea level… damn it… good thing they have mate de coca

See you in September…

P.S. it’s really weird having to pack both snow hat/gloves and swimsuit/beach towel in my bag…
P.P.S. I also had to “recycle” my bag, emptying it and filling it again with a bit less stuff! I’m going to trust the laundry services of our hotels, otherwise I don’t think I could have made it…

On Saturday, July 24th, I went to Arezzo. What for? To satisfy one of my teenager dreams… seeing Litfiba play live!
Unfortunately they broke up when I was almost starting to go to my first concerts… a big letdown… and after I missed the first dates of their reunion like a jerk, I looked for a concert from their summer tour that I could easily get to, and there Arezzo came up. Three hours by train, then everything can be reached just by walking… And the nice things of these small concerts is how easy it is to get to the front…
The concert was supposed to begin around 9.30 pm, with no bands playing before them, so I showed up around 7.30 pm and there’s a little bunch of fans, waiting at the barriers. At 7.45 they let us in, so we ran in, to sit down on the grass, and there you go, I was in the third row (well, some pogo-ing at the beginning of the concert helped a bit…)!

Awesome! Ghigo is 57 and Piero 48… but they played so hard! The setlist was great, with some pearls like “Cuore di Vetro”, and of course the usual hits (”Fata Morgana”, “El Diablo”, “Lacio Drom” etc. etc.), even if starting from a song-base of 150 tracks it was obvious they were going to leave some behind…
The new “Sole Nero” is also worth mentioning, as I really love it… I think it’s one of the best Italian songs of the last years, and it’s one of those rare songs that I can’t stop listening and that I feel I could loop for hours, even after just a few times I’ve listened to it…

Did they reunite for money? Well, I’m sure that was one of the factors… but after seeing how much fun they had, and the chemistry going on between them, I don’t find it hard to believe that the desire to get back on the track was very sincere…

I uploaded some pictures and videos of the concert here. In this other set, instead, are some pics I took while going around Arezzo; a really nice town. Also, I found out they shot a part of “Life is Beautiful” by Benigni there, and in some places you can find signs telling about the main scenes that were shot there (for example, the key that was thrown from the balcony ).

“Faccio a botte coi miei sogni…”

promotion NOUN

1 a move to a higher level in a company, institution, or sport
We try to fill our executive positions by promotion from within.
get/win/gain promotion: His number one objective is to get a promotion.
promotion to: his promotion to a position of leadership
2 the activity of encouraging or supporting something
A key element of his economic program is the promotion of free trade and investment.
The campaign is concerned with the promotion of health.
3 the process of attracting people’s attention to a product or event, for example by advertising
a ban on the promotion of tobacco products
the budget for advertising and promotions

See definition number 1…

Nosing around on the Flickr Blog I ran into a particular story… Matt Green decided to walk the USA, coast to coast (reminiscence of Forrest Gump?), telling about his journey on this blog. On foot, from Rockaway Beach (New York) to Rockaway Beach (Oregon), carrying what he needs in a cart, camping in farms, or in the woods if needed.
In this page he tells about the reason he decided to do it… a reason which actually isn’t there…

The nice thing is that his blog posts are not a travel diary; they’re impressions, flashes, observations about little or weird things you can only see if you slow down, at the speed of your feet. Most of the times his posts are only made up of a picture (which is uploaded on Flickr, of course) and a line of text (or even just a word). They’re nice to browse through… I started from the beginning and got as far as the beginning of May. It seems Matt has actually walked quite a lot, judging by the map on his blog homepage… I’m curious to keep reading.

In the meantime, I’ll link down here my favourite posts so far:

Day 14: “hibernated” signs
Day 15: conspiracies…
Day 21: tracks
Day 23: doesn’t look that comfy to me…
Day 25: interesting
Day 27: Randy and Curt
Day 28: fragment of a letter
Day 32: what a story…
Day 34: genius…
Day 39: hot!
Day 39: nice

(last pictures!)

After leaving Banff, we had a whole day of travel ahead of us, with not a lot of things to see after the “indigestion” of the previous days… The destination for the day was Vernon, a pleasant city in British Columbia, renowned for… well, not much I think… for us, it was merely a night stop, no point in lying. But we had to get back to Vernon somehow, right?

Along the way we stopped first to visit some anonymous waterfalls (I honestly can’t remember the name), then at the observation point for Big Hill Spiral Tunnels, two tunnels in an 8-shape that allow trains to climb a remarkable height without an excessively steep slope… nice, but unfortunately if there’s no train going through there’s not much to see… The main highlights of the following two stops were a nice squirrel, peeking from a hole in the asphalt of the stop area, and a nice ice-cream in a local farm / ice-cream shop. Then we got to Vernon and the day was over!

Ok, not quite, in Vernon we had an included Chinese dinner, not so great honestly (and please tell me: if I’m visiting Canada, why are the included dinners spaghetti, pizza, Chinese… which have nothing to do with Canada?!). Then we set up our own party in one of the hotel rooms, high-school trip style, with a bit of booze from the supermarket in front of the hotel, as we didn’t have many other options… fun things were Franck with an open umbrella, neck massage lessons and a few laughs together…

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I’ve never been a big fan of black and white. After all, the world is in color… I like colors. Indeed, when I’m touching up my pictures I usually push on saturation and contrast, sometimes even a bit too much, so that the blues, oranges and reds pop out…
Still, I have to admit that some pictures can look good even in black and white; furthermore, I’ve always been intrigued by the technique that leaves some colored elements on black and white pictures or movies (as in Schindler’s List or Sin City).
So, even if I’m still a fan of color pictures, I decided to make some attempts of black and white conversions, mostly to practice a bit with the various techniques. Here’s the small (so far) photo set.

First of all, when using digital cameras you’re better off shooting in color rather than using the dedicated “black and white” settings. That’s because when using those settings, the camera is simply doing what you’d be doing later on Photoshop, but without giving us any kind of control on it (or at least, with a much reduced control and without the chance to “undo” and try a different setting).
The two methods I used in Photoshop, which offer a different kind of control but good results in both cases, are the Channel Mixer and the Image Calculations, following the tips found in this article.

As regards the touches of color on black and white, this post shows the two main methods; a third way I’d like to point out is the simple use of the Quick Selection Tool or the Magic Wand, if the object you want to keep colored is good for that kind of selections. You can also use the History Brush, which is more immediate to use but IMHO harder to correct in case of mistakes; anyway, conceptually it’s the same thing as the standard brush usage described in the first post.
In any case, the basic concept is simple: once you have the black and white image, put it in a layer on top of the color one, and with the chosen method (brush, color range, selection) create a mask to “filter” the color so it gets visible. That’s it!

UPDATE: looking around a bit more, I found this post which lists 12 different ways to go black and white… the most interesting are the first one (probably the most complete but also the most time-consuming) and the dedicated Black and White Adjustment in Photoshop CS3.

(photo set here)

After getting to Banff in the afternoon, we went on to take possession of our rooms, some very nice 4-people chalets; but Mike and I got like and had one all for us… They’re just out of town, but in a few minutes by taxi or 20 minutes on foot you can get there easily.

After a shower we headed to the Bow River Falls, for the traditional group photo… with a little accident… good ol’ Bear, next to me in the pic, lost his balance and fell from the little wall we were standing on… trying to keep up, he hanged on to me, literally ripping off a part of my polo shirt, under the right arm! We had no time to get back to the hotel, but fortunately the temperature was quite cool, so I could cover up the problem by wearing a cardigan…

The dinner was included, honestly I can’t remember the place… maybe it was Melissa’s Restaurant? Could be… dinner was not bad, even if there wasn’t any really nifty food; we stayed in the bar are for a while, playing pool and foosball, before Ron led us to Wild Bill’s Saloon (dedicated to the Bill Peyto whose name was given to the omonimous lake…) for a cocktail and some country music, before getting a taxi back to the hotel.

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Here’s the photo set…

So far, western Canada had almost only given us rain… and rain… and more rain… Well, we were repayed on July 25th with the clearest and sunniest day since we had landed in Vancouver… just when we had to travel along the scenic route called “Icefields Parkway“! Priceless!

We left at 8 o’ clock sharp, and Ron had told us he woudln’t have any qualm leaving behind anyone who was late, as the day was packed with things to see… I tried to get there way before 8, so I could get the front row seats, but I was beaten by Kylie by a few minutes, so I had to make do with the second row…

The Icefields Parkway runs between Jasper and Banff, parallel to the Continental Divide of north-western America (the so-called “Great Divide”), that is the mountain range separating the rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean from the rivers flowing into the Arctic or Atlantic Ocean. What is peculiar of this highway is the beautiful sight on the many glaciers of the Greati Divide, with waterfalls, lakes and rivers nearby.

And indeed, just travelling along the road is a show in itself, and on that day we really saw lots of “rocks and trees”!

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Last Sunday, during the morning, I went outside for a walk to the “usual” landmarks of Milan, to test my new Nikkor 10-24 lens…
But I think I need to take a step back, as I haven’t yet dedicated a post on the blog to my Nikon D90 reflex, which I bought around a year ago…

Before digital cameras came around, I didn’t use cameras much… and come on, with films and their limited shots, and the time it took to develop the film and realize which photos came out nice and which didn’t (when it was too late already), they weren’t very friendly…
Moving to the digital era, I became a user of Casio’s Exilm cameras, from the simple zoomless S3 (but it was very small and thin for those times), to the excellent Z-750, on to the curious EX-V7 (7x internal zoom, at the expense of image quality, which was a bit lower than the 750). What I always loved about Exilims, which for other aspects were actually worse than their competitors, was the possibility to use them in full manual mode. After taking a few shots I was indeed getting intrigued about techniques like long exposures for night shots, or playing around with depth of field, so manual control was needed.

Still, what those little cameras could do was still limited, and after seeing some travel companions with their DSLRs (in Canada, Peru, Cuba…), after some careful researching, as I desired a greater control on pictures and a better quality especially for night shots, I went for the buy, in time for a field test in China.
At first I was interested in the Canon 500D, but I ended up going on the Nikon D90, which I preferred mainly because of the better quality in high ISO pictures (ironically, that’s due to the fact that the 500D has more megapixels than the D90, which is probably too much for the size of the sensor…), and because the D90 is a little step up in terms of functionalities.

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