Seeing the sights
Jun. 15th, 2010 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksI managed to get out of the flat by 3pm yesterday (it was 5pm the previous day). If I keep improving at this rate I'll be out of the flat by 7am on Friday.
TBH, there wasn't much of interest that happened (for which, read, nothing that would cause a GOM rant). Went out, saw quite a few sights, came back. Main excitement of day, getting on the wrong bus on the way in (although I quickly hopped off when it turned the wrong way, and no harm was done), and getting off the bus a stop too late on the way back. Hardly the stuff of excitement.
Ridiculously, for such an uneventful day, I took a large number of pictures. Part of this is caused by the fact that I'm tending to use manual settings, and often this requires four or more pictures before I'm happy.
I set off with the intention of seeing the Piazza Colonna again (I had rushed past it on Saturday evening) and the inside of the Santa Maria Sopra Minerva church and the Pantheon (both of which had closed by the time I arrived at the square on Sunday evening). The day had been hot, which mitigated against too much lounging in open spaces.
Unlike Nice, Rome is crowded. This is not particularly pleasant. I mean, Nice is hardly empty. But it's nothing like Rome.
The first place I ended up visiting just happened to be on the way to the Pantheon. This was the Santa Maria dell fucking apostrophe Anima (what's wrong with della Anima? What's wrong with inventing the new word "dell" if you insist on pronouncing it dell Anima?) Anyway, the Santa Maria dell'Anima on the Via dell'Anima is the German national church in Rome, so I popped in to take a picture of the tomb of Dutchman Hadrian VI, the last non-Italian Pope before John Paul II, and who died in 1523. I wasn't particularly on form with pictures yesterday, although in mitigation, the circumstances were rarely easy.
After that it was a short stroll to the Pantheon. The inside was (a) impressive and (b) crowded (as, of course, one would expect).
Picture from the main entrance. Wasn't really happy with the light settings on this.
This was better. I like the way I caught the flash of someone else's camera. Duh, as if a flash is going to make much difference to their picture.
The roof, and -- The power of manual settings! Auto pic would have just shown a white light in the middle and a black surround.
It's a short walk to the Santa Maria sopra Minerva, but even the churches are big tourist attractions in Rome, particularly this one. More high-quality art than you would see in many a museum.
It's a fairly large place. On the edge of this picture you can see a white light on the floor. This was the sunlight shining through a window on the top of the front door. I'm sure that this has a technical name, but learning the technicalities of architectural terms is not one of my ambitions. As Homer Simpson said, "remember when I went on that home winemaking course and forgot how to drive?"
Anyhoo, I must have spent 10 minutes trying to get a decent picture of this light, since, obv, it was the light to the moths of teenagers wanting to take pictures of each other.
I think that this was the best I could manage, and I wasn't happy with this.
Of great interest was the roof. Getting these pictures was equally challening. six to eight second exposures, achieved by the simple expedient of putting the camera on the ground, facing upwards, carefully pressing the button (that remote wire accessory that you see in old movies featuring weddings suddenly became an attractive option!) and stepping away. Gained admiring and puzzled looks from other tourists in about equal measure!
A detail. Wasn't displeased with this picture, given the challenging technical conditions and the material that I had to hand.
Medici Pope Leo X
Medici Pope Clement VII. I was distinctly undewhelmed with both these pictures. Possibly I had focus length wrong, possibly camera shake.
And, in front of these, the real masterpiece. Wish that I could have got better pictures!
Michaelangelo, obv. Epic non-fail.
I must have spent 45 minutes in the church, which was longer than I had planned. On my exit I somehow found myself in the Piazza di Pietra, which wasn't on my planned route, but was useful, since these Roman pillars are worth seeing. They are also the front of the modern Rome Stock Exchange.
From there I walked to the Piazza Colonna and the column of Marcus Aurelius, topped lter by a bronze statue of St Paul.
Behind me as I took this photo was the official residence of the Italian prime minister -- a somewhat grander affair than 10 Downing Street, but, hey, what do you expect from a country that pays its MPs E16,000 a month and which seems to be the European equivalent of "This is Africa"? In front of the building were clearly political types, the Italianate equivalents of Malcolm Tucker would be my guess. All of them clearly adept at the Italian greasy pole. The whole feeling about the place, to be honest, is one of looking out for oneself rather than looking out for Rome.
Of more interest was the building to my right.
This is the office of newspaper Il Tempo. I wish that I worked in offices so illustrious.
By now I wanted a wee (yes, I know, too much information), so I popped into the nearby Trinity College to watch the end of the Japan-Cameroon game. Price of a coke was now only E2.50, so they obviously hiked the prices for the England v USA game.
As Rich observed, it doesn't take long to get the hang of the geography of a place, and this makes me feel immeasurably less stressed. If I then move in increasing circles around places that I have already visited, I can keep the 2D map "in my mind". Most women (and not a few men), of course, can't read a map even if it's face-up in front of them, so this idea of the need for a "mental map" would seem little short of insane. But I really do need to have one. I'm forever bemused by people whose mental map of London consists of little bits of the city surrounding individual tube stations, with hardly any idea of how the whole thing ties together.
I took a look at my watch and made the executive decision to head for the Spanish Steps. Evening was falling -- it was about 6.30pm, so the open air was less debilitating (although it was still somewhat warm).
This entailed a walk down Rome's main shopping street. Presumably this will be pedestrianized "any decade now".
The Rough Guide writes that Rome was not built for the motor car, which is exemplified by the bad temper of Roman drivers. But in fact Rome is no less built for the motor car than is London. The two major differences are (a) Romans' incapability of parking anywhere more than 100 metres from their destination, resulting in parked cars clogging up major through-routes and (b) a complete lack of proper road planning and provision of car parks -- by which I mean, use of the roads and spare land to hand, not creation of new ones.
Mussolini undertook a major clear-up of central Rome so that he could highlight the city's glorious Roman republic past. As he did so, the population of Rome was also growing fast, which resulted in the creation of several new "suburbs". This is one of the reasons that much of the centre of Rome is like a tourist theme park with offices in the middle. But let's dispense with the myth that preservation of ancient Rome is the cause of the traffic mess. It isn't. It's the Romans today who are the cause of the traffic mess, both the drivers and the planners.
On my way to the Spanish Steps I passed the Column of the Immaculate Conception, put up to commemorate Pope Pius IX's announcement of this dogma. Would be fun if we put up similar things today, wouldn't it? "The column of early Thatcherism". "The column of Cameron's Big Society".
By now were were not just in the land of lots of people, but in the land of lots of people plus lots of people on official walking tours. I really don't think that I can take another bout of this today, so I have planned a trip to one or two places that should not be so crowded.
By this time I was struggling with the huge variations in light that you get in late afternoon. But this shows the Spanish Steps to the left, the Keats-Shelly museum on the corner, and, yes, a shop that looks to be making a pitch for the English poet market. Byron at one time lived just across the square. Keats thought Rome a bit of a shithole, actually, and didn't really want to be here. "I feel the flowers growing over me", he said, in words worthy of Pete Doherty, before snuffing it at 25.
A proper tourist picture -- the Keats Shelley house.
And the view from the top of the Steps. They are in a set of three and are quite a hike. Completed in 1725 to replace what had been a rough hill, they lead up to the Church of the Trinity on the Mount.
Another view of the Keats-Shelley house.
The Trinity of The Mount from the top of the steps. Once again the stalls selling tat rather detract from the whole effect, but this appears to be the nature of this place. There was one Arab chap with his ware of sunglasses at the top of the steps, with about a dozen young Italian svhoolkids around the blanket. This was clearly a syncopated stall-lifting exercise in the the planning, and the Arab bloke was frantically asking them all to step back, since he couldn't keep his eye on all of them at once. And, of course, calling for a policeman was not actually an option for him.
I now started walking north to the Villa Medici and the Pincio Terrace. This looks down on Rome as it leads towards the Park Borghese.
The Villa Medici, where Galileo was imprisoned for claiming that neo-Keynesian fiscal stimulation didn't work (ignore the urban myth about the earth going round the sun). Not easy to get a decent picture of this place. It's now the home of the French Academy.
A view of Rome, looking West-south-west, from near the Villa Medici. I really wasn't on form with the picture-taking yesterday.
The Pincio Gardens, a collection of "dilapidated busts" as The Rough Guide terms it. I thought it was uite pretty, but perhaps I was just appreciating the relative tranquility.
Well, it was tranquil. Until the football supporters arrived.
Contrary to what I had been told, Italy appears to be less World-Cup-mad than the English. Only a few Italian flags in windows, only a few football supporters. I got back home just as the match was ending and, while it was clear that most people were watching the game on TV, there had been no sense of national event. I was in a trattoria when the Paraguay goal went in, and the reaction from the Italians was not dissimilar from what one would expect from a half-hearted English supporter -- kind of a shrug and "well, what can you expect"?
I think the English mania for the England football team is an interesting anthropological and economic phenomenon. Remeber the 1966 World Cup? And all of the Union Flags? What happened to them? Well, Scottish and Welsh nationalism, devotion to the edges of the UK and ignoring the "old" centre, that's what happened. The "England flag" phenomenon is an English white working-class movement expressing itself in just about the only way it can do so without its proponents being arrested for racism or the advocating of hate crimes. Make no mistake about it, there's a large selection of the population who resent the SNP, foreign aid, and all of the stuff that they read in The Sun and so think must be true. But the law makes it impossible to express this resentment without being prosecuted. In a typical manner of backwards logic, people such as Diane Abbot think that this will make the problem disappear. What it does in fact is suppress it until it bursts out in other ways. If a bloke wants to use racist terms but knows that he can't because to do so will get him arrested, then he subconsciously waits for an opportunity to express those feelings in another way. The defiant waving of the English flag from car aerials is really a political statement of "Englishness" -- a statement that these people feel they have no other way of expressing in a multicultural society that they didn't ever vote for and they don't really want, thank you very much.
At the top of Borghese Park...
...one looks west down on Piazza del Popolo.
To the left of the picture above you see the top of the "Tridente", three roads that lead south from the Piazza del Popolo, the central one of which is the via del Corso (that traffic-packed beast I put up earlier) which leads all the way south to the Vittorio Emanuele II monument.
You can also see on the left one of the "twin churches" the Santa Marias of The Miracles and in Montesanto.
From here I began the walk down to the Piazza, coming across a rare moment of tranquility.
I continued my walk, and got a nice picture of the Piazza half way down the steps.
And below is a picture looking west, back up to the entrance to the Park Borghese:
To the north of the Piazza is the Santa Maria del Popolo, but this was shut by the time I arrived. A pity, because it has some great art, apparently. May have to make a revisit.
And, to the south...
New church, New church, so good they built it twice. These are the three roads heading south of the Tridente, with vie del Corsa in the middle.
A diversion at the top of via del Corsa
This is the via del Corsa looking south. You can see how it is crying out for pedestrianization. A short way down on the left is number 18, where Goethe stayed for a couple of years.
Instead of retracing my route down this street (I saw rather a nice shoe shop by the way), I went down the right hand road of the Trident, Via di Ripeta. This brought me to the Piazza del Augusto Imperatore, a square of some Roman ruin or another that I found most notable for two things.
The first notable piece of brutalist Fascis architecture, dated 1940,
and,
...some top-notch modern Italian architecture! Well done that man! This new building (not mentioned in The Rough Guide, so presumably little more than a year old) houses the Mausoleum of Augustus. The brown wall beneath the glass is engraved with italian writing.
Through the glass itself you can see the top of the mausoleum.
A view of the building from the south.
The south end (the "top end") of the building is a little pool with seats around it. A brilliant touch.
This really is a fantastic piece of architecture and I recommend visiting it highly. I'd be surprised it it hadn't won an award somewhere. It's a bit off the beaten track, and it's amazing how the number of tourists falls off dramatically outside the tourist theme park centre.
From here I carried on walking, back towards the Centro Storrico, with the intention of finding a restaurant showing the Italy Paraguay game. After the joy of discovering that new building housing the mausoleum, there didn't seem any point photographing anything else, although I did not consciously realize this at the time.
I found a trattoria and ordered their home-made pasta with sausages and mushrooms. I suspect that I should have ordered a pizza, because the focaccia that arrived unordered (but not uncharged for, obv) was delicious. The home-made pasta was, well, good, but not as good as I expected. My mum's first effort was just as nice. But the sauce was splendid. Cappucino not as good as the previous night, but not as pricy either. Perhaps you actually do get what you pay for.
Got the bus home after a small hiccup of trying to get on a bus that was not picking up passengers. Was uite knackered, but still got in a bit of poker (like a professional cyclist keeping in training :-))
And then this morning I woke up and my clock told me that it was 8.50am. Brilliant, I thought, I've slept for eight straight hours. After about five minutes I realized that something was not quite right. I looked at my travel alarm clock again and realized that it had been sideways-up. It wasn't ten-to-nine, it was twenty-to-six. So it goes.
TBH, there wasn't much of interest that happened (for which, read, nothing that would cause a GOM rant). Went out, saw quite a few sights, came back. Main excitement of day, getting on the wrong bus on the way in (although I quickly hopped off when it turned the wrong way, and no harm was done), and getting off the bus a stop too late on the way back. Hardly the stuff of excitement.
Ridiculously, for such an uneventful day, I took a large number of pictures. Part of this is caused by the fact that I'm tending to use manual settings, and often this requires four or more pictures before I'm happy.
I set off with the intention of seeing the Piazza Colonna again (I had rushed past it on Saturday evening) and the inside of the Santa Maria Sopra Minerva church and the Pantheon (both of which had closed by the time I arrived at the square on Sunday evening). The day had been hot, which mitigated against too much lounging in open spaces.
Unlike Nice, Rome is crowded. This is not particularly pleasant. I mean, Nice is hardly empty. But it's nothing like Rome.
The first place I ended up visiting just happened to be on the way to the Pantheon. This was the Santa Maria dell fucking apostrophe Anima (what's wrong with della Anima? What's wrong with inventing the new word "dell" if you insist on pronouncing it dell Anima?) Anyway, the Santa Maria dell'Anima on the Via dell'Anima is the German national church in Rome, so I popped in to take a picture of the tomb of Dutchman Hadrian VI, the last non-Italian Pope before John Paul II, and who died in 1523. I wasn't particularly on form with pictures yesterday, although in mitigation, the circumstances were rarely easy.
After that it was a short stroll to the Pantheon. The inside was (a) impressive and (b) crowded (as, of course, one would expect).
Picture from the main entrance. Wasn't really happy with the light settings on this.
This was better. I like the way I caught the flash of someone else's camera. Duh, as if a flash is going to make much difference to their picture.
The roof, and -- The power of manual settings! Auto pic would have just shown a white light in the middle and a black surround.
It's a short walk to the Santa Maria sopra Minerva, but even the churches are big tourist attractions in Rome, particularly this one. More high-quality art than you would see in many a museum.
It's a fairly large place. On the edge of this picture you can see a white light on the floor. This was the sunlight shining through a window on the top of the front door. I'm sure that this has a technical name, but learning the technicalities of architectural terms is not one of my ambitions. As Homer Simpson said, "remember when I went on that home winemaking course and forgot how to drive?"
Anyhoo, I must have spent 10 minutes trying to get a decent picture of this light, since, obv, it was the light to the moths of teenagers wanting to take pictures of each other.
I think that this was the best I could manage, and I wasn't happy with this.
Of great interest was the roof. Getting these pictures was equally challening. six to eight second exposures, achieved by the simple expedient of putting the camera on the ground, facing upwards, carefully pressing the button (that remote wire accessory that you see in old movies featuring weddings suddenly became an attractive option!) and stepping away. Gained admiring and puzzled looks from other tourists in about equal measure!
A detail. Wasn't displeased with this picture, given the challenging technical conditions and the material that I had to hand.
Medici Pope Leo X
Medici Pope Clement VII. I was distinctly undewhelmed with both these pictures. Possibly I had focus length wrong, possibly camera shake.
And, in front of these, the real masterpiece. Wish that I could have got better pictures!
Michaelangelo, obv. Epic non-fail.
I must have spent 45 minutes in the church, which was longer than I had planned. On my exit I somehow found myself in the Piazza di Pietra, which wasn't on my planned route, but was useful, since these Roman pillars are worth seeing. They are also the front of the modern Rome Stock Exchange.
From there I walked to the Piazza Colonna and the column of Marcus Aurelius, topped lter by a bronze statue of St Paul.
Behind me as I took this photo was the official residence of the Italian prime minister -- a somewhat grander affair than 10 Downing Street, but, hey, what do you expect from a country that pays its MPs E16,000 a month and which seems to be the European equivalent of "This is Africa"? In front of the building were clearly political types, the Italianate equivalents of Malcolm Tucker would be my guess. All of them clearly adept at the Italian greasy pole. The whole feeling about the place, to be honest, is one of looking out for oneself rather than looking out for Rome.
Of more interest was the building to my right.
This is the office of newspaper Il Tempo. I wish that I worked in offices so illustrious.
By now I wanted a wee (yes, I know, too much information), so I popped into the nearby Trinity College to watch the end of the Japan-Cameroon game. Price of a coke was now only E2.50, so they obviously hiked the prices for the England v USA game.
As Rich observed, it doesn't take long to get the hang of the geography of a place, and this makes me feel immeasurably less stressed. If I then move in increasing circles around places that I have already visited, I can keep the 2D map "in my mind". Most women (and not a few men), of course, can't read a map even if it's face-up in front of them, so this idea of the need for a "mental map" would seem little short of insane. But I really do need to have one. I'm forever bemused by people whose mental map of London consists of little bits of the city surrounding individual tube stations, with hardly any idea of how the whole thing ties together.
I took a look at my watch and made the executive decision to head for the Spanish Steps. Evening was falling -- it was about 6.30pm, so the open air was less debilitating (although it was still somewhat warm).
This entailed a walk down Rome's main shopping street. Presumably this will be pedestrianized "any decade now".
The Rough Guide writes that Rome was not built for the motor car, which is exemplified by the bad temper of Roman drivers. But in fact Rome is no less built for the motor car than is London. The two major differences are (a) Romans' incapability of parking anywhere more than 100 metres from their destination, resulting in parked cars clogging up major through-routes and (b) a complete lack of proper road planning and provision of car parks -- by which I mean, use of the roads and spare land to hand, not creation of new ones.
Mussolini undertook a major clear-up of central Rome so that he could highlight the city's glorious Roman republic past. As he did so, the population of Rome was also growing fast, which resulted in the creation of several new "suburbs". This is one of the reasons that much of the centre of Rome is like a tourist theme park with offices in the middle. But let's dispense with the myth that preservation of ancient Rome is the cause of the traffic mess. It isn't. It's the Romans today who are the cause of the traffic mess, both the drivers and the planners.
On my way to the Spanish Steps I passed the Column of the Immaculate Conception, put up to commemorate Pope Pius IX's announcement of this dogma. Would be fun if we put up similar things today, wouldn't it? "The column of early Thatcherism". "The column of Cameron's Big Society".
By now were were not just in the land of lots of people, but in the land of lots of people plus lots of people on official walking tours. I really don't think that I can take another bout of this today, so I have planned a trip to one or two places that should not be so crowded.
By this time I was struggling with the huge variations in light that you get in late afternoon. But this shows the Spanish Steps to the left, the Keats-Shelly museum on the corner, and, yes, a shop that looks to be making a pitch for the English poet market. Byron at one time lived just across the square. Keats thought Rome a bit of a shithole, actually, and didn't really want to be here. "I feel the flowers growing over me", he said, in words worthy of Pete Doherty, before snuffing it at 25.
A proper tourist picture -- the Keats Shelley house.
And the view from the top of the Steps. They are in a set of three and are quite a hike. Completed in 1725 to replace what had been a rough hill, they lead up to the Church of the Trinity on the Mount.
Another view of the Keats-Shelley house.
The Trinity of The Mount from the top of the steps. Once again the stalls selling tat rather detract from the whole effect, but this appears to be the nature of this place. There was one Arab chap with his ware of sunglasses at the top of the steps, with about a dozen young Italian svhoolkids around the blanket. This was clearly a syncopated stall-lifting exercise in the the planning, and the Arab bloke was frantically asking them all to step back, since he couldn't keep his eye on all of them at once. And, of course, calling for a policeman was not actually an option for him.
I now started walking north to the Villa Medici and the Pincio Terrace. This looks down on Rome as it leads towards the Park Borghese.
The Villa Medici, where Galileo was imprisoned for claiming that neo-Keynesian fiscal stimulation didn't work (ignore the urban myth about the earth going round the sun). Not easy to get a decent picture of this place. It's now the home of the French Academy.
A view of Rome, looking West-south-west, from near the Villa Medici. I really wasn't on form with the picture-taking yesterday.
The Pincio Gardens, a collection of "dilapidated busts" as The Rough Guide terms it. I thought it was uite pretty, but perhaps I was just appreciating the relative tranquility.
Well, it was tranquil. Until the football supporters arrived.
Contrary to what I had been told, Italy appears to be less World-Cup-mad than the English. Only a few Italian flags in windows, only a few football supporters. I got back home just as the match was ending and, while it was clear that most people were watching the game on TV, there had been no sense of national event. I was in a trattoria when the Paraguay goal went in, and the reaction from the Italians was not dissimilar from what one would expect from a half-hearted English supporter -- kind of a shrug and "well, what can you expect"?
I think the English mania for the England football team is an interesting anthropological and economic phenomenon. Remeber the 1966 World Cup? And all of the Union Flags? What happened to them? Well, Scottish and Welsh nationalism, devotion to the edges of the UK and ignoring the "old" centre, that's what happened. The "England flag" phenomenon is an English white working-class movement expressing itself in just about the only way it can do so without its proponents being arrested for racism or the advocating of hate crimes. Make no mistake about it, there's a large selection of the population who resent the SNP, foreign aid, and all of the stuff that they read in The Sun and so think must be true. But the law makes it impossible to express this resentment without being prosecuted. In a typical manner of backwards logic, people such as Diane Abbot think that this will make the problem disappear. What it does in fact is suppress it until it bursts out in other ways. If a bloke wants to use racist terms but knows that he can't because to do so will get him arrested, then he subconsciously waits for an opportunity to express those feelings in another way. The defiant waving of the English flag from car aerials is really a political statement of "Englishness" -- a statement that these people feel they have no other way of expressing in a multicultural society that they didn't ever vote for and they don't really want, thank you very much.
At the top of Borghese Park...
...one looks west down on Piazza del Popolo.
To the left of the picture above you see the top of the "Tridente", three roads that lead south from the Piazza del Popolo, the central one of which is the via del Corso (that traffic-packed beast I put up earlier) which leads all the way south to the Vittorio Emanuele II monument.
You can also see on the left one of the "twin churches" the Santa Marias of The Miracles and in Montesanto.
From here I began the walk down to the Piazza, coming across a rare moment of tranquility.
I continued my walk, and got a nice picture of the Piazza half way down the steps.
And below is a picture looking west, back up to the entrance to the Park Borghese:
To the north of the Piazza is the Santa Maria del Popolo, but this was shut by the time I arrived. A pity, because it has some great art, apparently. May have to make a revisit.
And, to the south...
New church, New church, so good they built it twice. These are the three roads heading south of the Tridente, with vie del Corsa in the middle.
A diversion at the top of via del Corsa
This is the via del Corsa looking south. You can see how it is crying out for pedestrianization. A short way down on the left is number 18, where Goethe stayed for a couple of years.
Instead of retracing my route down this street (I saw rather a nice shoe shop by the way), I went down the right hand road of the Trident, Via di Ripeta. This brought me to the Piazza del Augusto Imperatore, a square of some Roman ruin or another that I found most notable for two things.
The first notable piece of brutalist Fascis architecture, dated 1940,
and,
...some top-notch modern Italian architecture! Well done that man! This new building (not mentioned in The Rough Guide, so presumably little more than a year old) houses the Mausoleum of Augustus. The brown wall beneath the glass is engraved with italian writing.
Through the glass itself you can see the top of the mausoleum.
A view of the building from the south.
The south end (the "top end") of the building is a little pool with seats around it. A brilliant touch.
This really is a fantastic piece of architecture and I recommend visiting it highly. I'd be surprised it it hadn't won an award somewhere. It's a bit off the beaten track, and it's amazing how the number of tourists falls off dramatically outside the tourist theme park centre.
From here I carried on walking, back towards the Centro Storrico, with the intention of finding a restaurant showing the Italy Paraguay game. After the joy of discovering that new building housing the mausoleum, there didn't seem any point photographing anything else, although I did not consciously realize this at the time.
I found a trattoria and ordered their home-made pasta with sausages and mushrooms. I suspect that I should have ordered a pizza, because the focaccia that arrived unordered (but not uncharged for, obv) was delicious. The home-made pasta was, well, good, but not as good as I expected. My mum's first effort was just as nice. But the sauce was splendid. Cappucino not as good as the previous night, but not as pricy either. Perhaps you actually do get what you pay for.
Got the bus home after a small hiccup of trying to get on a bus that was not picking up passengers. Was uite knackered, but still got in a bit of poker (like a professional cyclist keeping in training :-))
And then this morning I woke up and my clock told me that it was 8.50am. Brilliant, I thought, I've slept for eight straight hours. After about five minutes I realized that something was not quite right. I looked at my travel alarm clock again and realized that it had been sideways-up. It wasn't ten-to-nine, it was twenty-to-six. So it goes.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 01:26 pm (UTC)The sites look really beautiful even if it was a little crowded, Its only my list of places to visit :) I'm still enjoying Norway and England for the forseeable future though,
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 04:53 pm (UTC)The put-it-on-the-floor method seems to have worked rather well, though. I use a remote release cable thingy for anything involving a long exposure. Not always with any increased success, mind, but it's a hugely useful piece of kit.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 06:38 pm (UTC)I'm not sure what whacking down the field depth (4.0 appears to be my minimum, although I thought I could get to 2.8) via the AV option would do, because the camera then tries to help by shortening the exposure time (it assumes you want to photograph something moving fast).
So, shock of shocks, I'm going over the the "M" setting, where you manually set both exposure time and field depth. That should be a fun experiment, and may take some getting the hang of. But I found the relevant page on the manual quickly enough, which should be a good sign.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 06:45 pm (UTC)PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 07:02 pm (UTC)But it's definitely worth seeing how the camera operates with high ISOs: my Canon is pretty good up to 800, even 1600 if I'm not being too critical. Is yours the K100? If so I think you have ISO 200-3200 available - the top end is usually a bit ropey on most cameras, but the next one down should be acceptable.
*I think most Pentax DSLRs do actually have built-in stabilisation in the body, in which case you'd have a bit more leeway. I think they may call it "Shake Reduction".
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 08:31 pm (UTC)I have a "shake" switch. I assume that I should turn this off? I've had it turned on thus far.
Widest aperture I have available to me under the "M" setting doesn't seem to be constant -- which I don't understand. Perhaps I'm just tired and it will all be clear in the morning
However, experimented tonight with an 8-second f5.6 tripod based shot of moon and (I think) Mars. Took many many attempts, but generated a half-decent result in the end!
PJ
no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-15 09:28 pm (UTC)Keith S
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Date: 2010-06-16 09:10 am (UTC)Aksu
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Date: 2010-06-16 12:39 pm (UTC)I used to thinks this and while I think your general point holds, I've been amazed at the number of black and Asian people who've been flying the England flag around London.