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peterbirksWell, I'm sitting in my holiday apartment in Nice. I was up at 3am, but the trip was very smooth, apart from the fact that I forgot to bring my prescription sunglasses, and left a scarf behind, probably in the executive lounge. Still, I've had it for two years. Another trip to FCUK to see what this year's colour is!
The BA queue at Gatwick was fairly bad. Or perhaps it was the standard Virgin queue. There were also significantly more people than usual in the Easyjet queue. Rock on Speedy Boarding. Worth every penny!
The plane also had only three cabin crew, which meant that they were restricted to 150 passengers (must have been galling for Easyjet with BA on strike!). That in turn meant that the middle seat on my set of three was "out of use". I'm winning all round here, I thought.
Oh, and when I arrived, the sun came out. Quickly up to 18 degrees. Magic.
I set up the computer to make sure the Interweb was working, made a quick trip to Monoprix for provisions, and then had a nap. Perhaps I should have had a nap first, because I bought a pizza. And this apartment doesn't have an oven.
It's a smaller place than last November's, but it has a terrace, and it's smack in the Vieux Ville, which I think I prefer to the "west end" of the other place. Oh, and it has a bath rather than just a shower. Six and two threes about which I prefer overall. The other would be better to LIVE in, but I think that this is a better holiday apartment.
One thing though ... it's a lot of steps! The fifth floor is a bastard in an old building with no lift! But I like it.
Sitting on the terrace.
The stylish...
... & the eccentric.
Moonrise over Nice
.
I love you.
It was warm, but I didn't think that it was this warm.
"So, you up to anything tonight?"
"Nahh. just chillin'".
A big boat (105ft), a bigger boat, and a fucking ginormous boat. It's really hard to get over how big these bastards are...
... but one way would be to say, you could easily fit any of these smaller boats in front inside the boot of the biggest of the boats opposite.
I went for a walk along the coastal road to the east of Nice (a short mile-long or so road that soon doubles back to the "main" coastal road to Villefranche). I think that this platform is only for seriously brave (or insane) divers.
Some of the more baroque buildings seen from this road. They are in fact on the "main" road, but you can't see them from there!
By now I had reached the main road and was walking back towards Nice. This is the Corsica ferry, which I assume sails overnight on Saturdays.
The statue of Garibaldi in Place Garibaldi. Very close to Vieux Ville and my apartment.
Place Garibaldi. It was nearly dark by now, so I used a longer exposure.
The scene at the bottom of my apartment! Does anyone know the easiest way to get rid of the "sodium yellow" of this kind of night shot?
The apartment. Bedroom to the left, bathroom to second-left. Main door top right.
I looked at some immobiliers' windows, and property is definitely coming off the peak of three years ago quite significantly. I could probably buy this place for not much more than E105,000. Some impressive places in Nice outskirts were available for less than a million. Some VERY impressive places in Villefranche and Mont Boron were in the E2.5m range.
_____________________
The BA queue at Gatwick was fairly bad. Or perhaps it was the standard Virgin queue. There were also significantly more people than usual in the Easyjet queue. Rock on Speedy Boarding. Worth every penny!
The plane also had only three cabin crew, which meant that they were restricted to 150 passengers (must have been galling for Easyjet with BA on strike!). That in turn meant that the middle seat on my set of three was "out of use". I'm winning all round here, I thought.
Oh, and when I arrived, the sun came out. Quickly up to 18 degrees. Magic.
I set up the computer to make sure the Interweb was working, made a quick trip to Monoprix for provisions, and then had a nap. Perhaps I should have had a nap first, because I bought a pizza. And this apartment doesn't have an oven.
It's a smaller place than last November's, but it has a terrace, and it's smack in the Vieux Ville, which I think I prefer to the "west end" of the other place. Oh, and it has a bath rather than just a shower. Six and two threes about which I prefer overall. The other would be better to LIVE in, but I think that this is a better holiday apartment.
One thing though ... it's a lot of steps! The fifth floor is a bastard in an old building with no lift! But I like it.
Sitting on the terrace.
The stylish...
... & the eccentric.
Moonrise over Nice
.
I love you.
It was warm, but I didn't think that it was this warm.
"So, you up to anything tonight?"
"Nahh. just chillin'".
A big boat (105ft), a bigger boat, and a fucking ginormous boat. It's really hard to get over how big these bastards are...
... but one way would be to say, you could easily fit any of these smaller boats in front inside the boot of the biggest of the boats opposite.
I went for a walk along the coastal road to the east of Nice (a short mile-long or so road that soon doubles back to the "main" coastal road to Villefranche). I think that this platform is only for seriously brave (or insane) divers.
Some of the more baroque buildings seen from this road. They are in fact on the "main" road, but you can't see them from there!
By now I had reached the main road and was walking back towards Nice. This is the Corsica ferry, which I assume sails overnight on Saturdays.
The statue of Garibaldi in Place Garibaldi. Very close to Vieux Ville and my apartment.
Place Garibaldi. It was nearly dark by now, so I used a longer exposure.
The scene at the bottom of my apartment! Does anyone know the easiest way to get rid of the "sodium yellow" of this kind of night shot?
The apartment. Bedroom to the left, bathroom to second-left. Main door top right.
I looked at some immobiliers' windows, and property is definitely coming off the peak of three years ago quite significantly. I could probably buy this place for not much more than E105,000. Some impressive places in Nice outskirts were available for less than a million. Some VERY impressive places in Villefranche and Mont Boron were in the E2.5m range.
_____________________
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-27 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-27 08:20 pm (UTC)It's just a mezzanine sleeping area (estate agentese) or "sleeping platform" in real English. Fair amount of space up there, but not much headroom!
PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-03-28 10:57 am (UTC)Filter, post processing with GIMP, Paintshop or Photoshop (in ascending order of cost) or fill-in flash (though you are probably on the timid side to be flashing people in the dark but what you get up to in the evenings in your business).
From ignorance
Date: 2010-03-28 03:14 pm (UTC)Still, I suspect that filters fall into the Gutenberg end of technology (I'm wide open to correction here). Leaving aside the qualities one would wish for the camera itself (succinctly defined by a semi-pro friend as "a bloody good lens and the best CCD you can find -- capture all the light you can"), I suspect the answer is to capture every photo in RAW format and use Paintshop or Photoshop at leisure. The GIMP is, er, awkward and cumbersome.
That diving platform looks mildly insane, but not entirely insane. I visited the James Joyce Martello Tower/Museum in Sandycove last time I was in Dublin. Well, I say visited; it had been closed for the last four weeks of the summer, had re-opened for a random day and a half, and had closed again for some unspecified national holiday ... it's a distinctly unimpressive place, even though it's apparently where the first two or three chapters of Ulysses were based.
Anyway. There's nothing much else to do in Sandycove, except to buy a chicken tikka sandwich from the local convenience store (which I recommend) or a set of overpriced "antique" furniture or "classic" books (neither of which I recommend). There are two pubs, and they both look like open sore advertisements for being a derelict instead. You can walk down a little way and sit on a bench commemorating the early death of a Rasta biker while you eat your chicken tikka sandwich and stare over the bay. You can also watch a bunch of 14 year old lads out on the train from Dublin attempting to commit suicide by diving off an eight-foot platform onto a bunch of jagged rocks thinly covered with occasional spume.
I suppose danger is in the eyes of the beholder, but I had to cover mine -- at least until I inadvertently stuffed chicken tikka up my nose.
Re: From ignorance
Date: 2010-03-28 04:33 pm (UTC)I looked up GIMP. Well, cheap! And I see what you mean by "cumbersome".
I think I would need a bit more motive to try any of these, although GIMP might be fun if I was retired!
Re: From ignorance
Date: 2010-03-28 05:06 pm (UTC)I'll stand by the idea of concentrating on getting as much light through the lens as can be properly processed. I'll also stand by an insistence on the RAW format (assuming you've got enough memory on the camera).
Best deal I can find is Photoshop CS4 (http://softwarecd.co.uk/graphic%20design.htm?gclid=CKzYkIf226ACFdkB4wodljfgCQ) for twenty five quid. (Bear in mind that I owe you a tenner.) Might just give you an idea for when the Birks Guide to World-Wide Insurance Fiascos eventually makes you the odd twenty thousand or so ...
Re: From ignorance
Date: 2010-03-28 05:56 pm (UTC)In PaintShop there was a temperature control so you could alter the "temperature of the light" - 6000K being being the surface of the Sun and it happens to be that Sodium colour. You can "heat" the picture up to whiten it. Otherwise, you are fiddling with the RGB curves all night. A trick would be to have something you know to be 100% white in the picture and then use that as your guide in processing.
I can run through processing in GIMP, on a slow Linux machine, in no time at all. It's my favoured package now, especially as I won't need to fork out any more. Given time the programming team will make it more and more PhotoShop like in its UI.
RAW captures everything, unlike JPEG, at the cost of memory. Swings and roundabouts.
Re: From ignorance
Date: 2010-03-28 06:46 pm (UTC)It looks to me that,on an RGB scale, you could do worse than to build up the blue and tone down the red...
PJ
Re: From ignorance
Date: 2010-03-28 08:54 pm (UTC)Re: From ignorance
Date: 2010-03-28 09:03 pm (UTC)Moving the levels seemed to work sufficiently well -- Picasa has auto-adjusts to get rid of that washed-out look. But, for my purposes, it isn't unusable. Very pleasing !!
PJ