This is the largest of the famous circle terraces at Moray in Peru. Moray is thought to have been an Inca agricultural station. The steps used to climb down to the center (visible here as zig-zags) were built by the Incas into the sides of the terraces as jutting stones in order to maximize the available farming surface. You can get a sense of the massiveness of the circles by taking note of how tiny the people look.
Date: 8/22/2012 Camera: Panasonic DMC-FZ40 Click for larger view
My first-ever book giveaway is entering the home stretch! There are just over four days remaining to enter the contest, available to U.S. residents 18 and older. So far, 245 people have entered to win a free signed copy of my dark fantasy novel, The Eyes of Mictlan, which I will personalize for the winners.
If you don’t win but are still interested in reading the novel, I hope you will consider the eBook version, available for just $2.99–or free to Amazon Prime members (via the lending library) and Kindle Unlimited subscribers. If you do not own a Kindle, you can download free Kindle reading software for almost any computer or mobile device.
July 8, 2014: Today I took a trip through the picturesque area of the English countryside known as the Cotswolds, which included visits to four historic villages. This was another tour taken though Premium Tours. It’s a great tour to take if you like strolling through quaint villages and doing a lot of shopping, but in my case I felt as if it was a tour I probably could have skipped.
Don’t get me wrong, the villages were all very cute, but for me it wasn’t worth a 5 a.m. wakeup call and a missed extra day I could have spent exploring London. Perhaps a half-day trip would have been better, as I could have gotten the Cotswolds experience without using up my entire day—the villages were similar enough to each other that it wasn’t really necessary to see all of them.
It probably didn’t help that the much-touted lunch at a 17-century Inn was a huge disappointment. Our only choices were trout or vegetarian pasta. I don’t like seafood, so I was stuck with the pasta, which was decidedly mediocre, plus some fruit thing for dessert that I didn’t like. I wasn’t expecting five-star dining, but offering one meat option would have been nice (later in the day I made up for my lunch disappointment by having a nice afternoon tea with scones in one of the villages).
Nevertheless, the trip offered many nice photographic opportunities and I would still recommend it if you’re looking to do something different and get out of London for a day (though if you can only choose one trip, the Bath/Stonehenge trip is much better).
Here are some photos from my day:
19th century village stocks
Rupert Murdoch’s Daughter lives here and doesn’t like people taking photos, so of course I took one. 😉
NOT a public garden. Only enter if you enjoy being accosted by an angry homeowner. 🙂
Word to the wise: make sure you don’t wander into private property. I made this mistake in the first village we visited. I followed a couple of people from my tour through an open gate into a large garden area that appeared to lead to a church. Alas, it was someone’s private property (I missed the sign on the way in) and we were chased out by an irate home owner. Based on how unreceptive he was to my apologies, it must happen to him a lot. Later, when we rode back through the town, I noticed that the gate was closed. 🙂
We returned to London late in the evening. I can’t recall what I did for dinner; I may just have called it a night since I had an early wake-up call. The following morning I would be taking another excursion outside of London, this time to Leeds Castle, Dover, Canterbury, and finally to Greenwich for a boat ride back into central London.
This is a photo of the Grand Canal in Venice from my 2011 Eurotrip. I had previously posted it as a pseudo-HDR experiment (i.e., HDR from a single image), but as my photo-processing skills have improved in the two years since the original post, I thought this was a photo worth revisiting. I think this non-HDR version looks much better, sharper and more realistic.
Date: 10/23/2011 Camera: Panasonic DMC-FZ40 Click for larger view
While I was at it, I also decided to re-process this photo from the same trip, taken in Krka National Park, Croatia, but in this case, rather than create a new post, I just updated the photo in the original post with a better version:
I took this photo at the Tunnel View lookout on my way down to Yosemite Valley. The scene looks so pristine you’d never know that, as I snapped this photo, I was drowning in a sea of selfie stick-wielding people who seemed more interested in taking photos of themselves than of the gorgeous view in front of them.
Date: 10/18/2014 Camera: Nikon D5100 Click for larger view
This is a view of the Florence Cathedral’s dome as seen from the top of Giotto’s Campanile (a.k.a., Giotto’s Bell Tower), overlooking the beautiful city of Florence and out toward the hills beyond. Somewhere in those hills stands the villa in which I lived for two weeks during the fall of 2011.
Date: 10/16/2011 Camera: Panasonic DMC-FZ40 Click for larger view
This is a shot from inside the Pantheon in Rome, Italy. It is one of the best preserved of all Ancient Roman buildings, and its dome is the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.
Because of the Pantheon’s size and circular shape, it’s difficult to get large portions of the interior in frame without taking a panorama, so this one does not include the oculus (opening at the top of the dome), but you can see the sunlight from the opening shining down on the side of the dome. The overexposed entrance sort of makes it appear as if people are filing in through some type of mystical portal . . . well, it would make a neat story, anyway.
Date: 10/21/2011 Camera: Panasonic DMC-FZ40 Click for larger view
July 7, 2014: It was my first day back in London after spending three days in Scotland and I was still recovering from lack of sleep, so I got a late start after allowing myself to sleep in. I didn’t have any excursions scheduled during the day (just a play I had tickets for in the evening), so my plan was to take it easy, meandering about the city and taking a couple of pilgrimages to iconic rock locations.
First on the list was Abbey Road, site of the famous Beatles album cover of the same name. I took the subway to the closest station and made my way to Abbey Road Studios.
Pilgrimage Accomplished
The crosswalk is actually in a busy intersection with no traffic light, so I tried to respect motorists by crossing as quickly as possible, but many people were quite a bit less courteous, stepping in front of cars and spending long periods of time setting up their photos. The locals are used to this, so they’re patient in allowing people to cross and take their photos, but when people linger in the middle of the road to take multiple shots and exaggerated poses, then the motorists understandably start to get irritated.
Abbey Road Crossing
I wasn’t about to hold up traffic by asking someone to take a photo of me as I crossed, but I was still able to get footage of my crossing via the web cam trained on the crosswalk. All you have to do is go to the Abbey Road Studios web site and grab the shots of your crossing, and if you time it right, your friends and family back home can actually watch your crossing live via the video feed. Here is a shot from the web cam:
That’s me looking up at the camera.
I then headed back to the subway station, and as you can see from the photo below, a nearby shop knows how to capitalize on Beatlemania.
A Day in the Life of a local coffee shop.
My next destination was the Battersea Power Station. If you are a Pink Floyd fan, this is the building featured on the cover of their Animals album. I made my way down to the Thames and walked along the bank for about 30 minutes before realizing that I had turned in the wrong direction, so I was forced to backtrack. Here are some photos from that stretch.
Looking Across the ThamesAnother Thames shot.The Tate Britain Art Museum
By the time I began to see the station it had started to rain—because you can’t walk for an hour in London without encountering rain—at least I couldn’t. 🙂
I was surprised at how massive the station is; it completely dominates the landscape of that portion of the Thames. Here are a couple of photos (I liked these better than my attempts at recreating the actual album cover, and I’m pretty sure the album photo was shot from the other side of the river anyway).
Battersea Power StationThe Battersea (sans flying pig)
I thought about checking out the Tour de France, which was wrapping up its London leg today, but decided I didn’t feel like braving the crowds, so I settled for snapping this photo of a biker who may or may not have been part of the race.
Race straggler or casual biker?
I then made my way back toward the center of the city and ducked out of the rain into an Italian restaurant for an early dinner. Inside they had the end of the Tour de France on television, so I sat and watched that with a glass of prosecco and a ravioli dinner. I don’t remember much about the dinner itself, so it couldn’t have been great, but it wasn’t bad, either.
After dinner, with the rain still beating down, I decided to just head back to my apartment and get ready for my evening trip to the West End, where I would be seeing a play called Let the Right One In, an adaptation of an excellent Swedish vampire film. I had bought the tickets online ahead of time for something like ten pounds—shocking that you can see a show in London for a fraction of what it would cost on Broadway, or maybe I was just lucky with that particular show.
While getting ready for the evening I watched some TV—an interesting aspect of TV in Britain is that American television shows seem to be played at a faster speed. Perhaps it has something to do with British television broadcasting at a different frame rate, but the effect was that every cast member of The Big Bang Theory sounded as if they had just inhaled helium. Thus, I can’t help wondering if everyone in England is under the impression that Americans talk like chipmunks. 😉
Instead of riding the subway to the theater district I decided to take the long walk from my apartment and enjoy the newly emerged sun. I did not bring my camera with me since I wasn’t sure what the theater rules were regarding cameras, so there are no photos from my walk through some interesting neighborhoods.
Along the way I stumbled across a hotel that serves afternoon tea. To this point I had not had a proper British afternoon tea and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to remedy that. For my tea I chose an excellent Earl Grey, which was served with savory sandwiches, tasty sweets, and delicious fresh-baked scones with clotted cream (also known as Devonshire cream). The low-quality cell phone photo below does not do the spread justice.
Tea Time
Needless to say, I am now a huge fan of British-style afternoon tea—I had always been a big tea drinker, but the Brits take it to a whole different level. Now, whenever I go on a trip here in the States, I keep my eyes peeled for a place serving afternoon tea.
Unfortunately, I had to kind of rush through my tea because the show would be starting soon, so I finished up and made my way to the theater. The Apollo is a nice, historic building, lending the play some additional atmosphere.
The Apollo
All of the seats in the theater appear to be good. Here was my view of the stage:
Set of Let the Right One In
During the first act, the person behind me kept kicking my chair while a couple sitting directly in front of me kept making out (or snogging, to use a British term) throughout the entire show like hormonal teenagers in a movie theater, so after intermission I moved to a relatively empty section where I could watch the second act in peace.
As for the show itself, the play was outstanding, really well-conceived, and every bit as affecting as the film. The overall tone was sufficiently eerie, the performances were great, and the music and choreography during transition scenes was stunning. All in all, I was glad I decided to spend one of my evenings in London at the theater.
After the show I walked around Picadilly Circus, which is very cool when it is all lit up at night (I would return later in the week with my fast prime lens to take some night photos). I then headed back to the apartment. In the morning I would be venturing outside London on a trip to the Cotswolds.
During my visit to San Francisco last year I captured this bird splashing violently in the water as another bird struggled to get out of the line of fire.
Date: 10/15/2014 Camera: Nikon D5100 Click for larger view
I took a little day trip to Bruceland this past weekend (a.k.a. Asbury Park). Here’s a photo from inside the ruin of the old casino looking out toward the boardwalk. I only had a malfunctioning pocket camera with me, but it didn’t turn out too badly.
Date: 8/1/2015 Camera: Panasonic DMC-FX8 Click for larger view
Michael Rappa 