Photos

A long time ago in a land far, far away, Adriana and I caught up with family and friends. And then I fell into some sort of Internet coma. I showed some signs of consciousness with Frex (still working on it), and now here I am with another post. So, Australia. We went to Oz back in May. I’d never been to Uluru before, even though I’d been to Alice Springs for a wedding (it’s not really that close to Uluru, but while you’re in the general area…), but at the time I was a university student with no money, and getting a day trip to the rock was well out of my price range. This time around I wasn’t going to miss it, so decided that a 3-day camping tour out of Alice Springs would be the ticket. We had a couple of days in Alice Springs to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in yonks, acclimate (that is, let all the Florida humidity I’d acquired over the years evaporate), and try and sync up with the timezone. We also accumulated enough red dust to last us till we returned to Florida. ...

Adriana and I (way back in February now) spent a week in Costa Rica, dividing our time between the Arenal region (to see a volcano that turned out to be camera shy) and Quepos, a town on the southern area of the West coast. Hiring a car turned out being incredibly expensive, mostly due to the mandatory government insurance that can nearly cost as much as the rental itself. We found car hire necessary however, although we did not get a 4WD but instead opted for the cheap Toyota Yaris. For the one place that required a 4WD for access, we got there via a tour bus. ...

Adriana and I were out with friends at Markham Park in Broward on Sunday. It’s a pretty cool park that has a model airplane field, mountain bike trails, areas for jet skiing, a shooting range, and a Jamaican guy with a van that had a fully sick subwoofer, a couch, and 420,000 miles on the odometer. I got distracted by a very active jumping spider, which was indifferent to my efforts to try and get it to ‘sit’ still. When you only have a depth of field of several millimetres as I do with my macro lens at its closest focus point, shooting a moving object can be frustrating. Having a speedlight handy gives some extra light so you can increase the f-stop and get a much larger depth of field, so I was happy I brought my whole kit along. ...

From Arequipa we went on a guided tour of the Chivay/Colca Canyon region for a couple of days. The canyon is approximately four kilometres deep, making it about twice as deep as that of the Grand Canyon, so I was pretty excited about seeing that and possibly a Condor. The small tour bus took us around the extinct volcano Chachani towards the town of Chivay where we’d be staying the night. We went past a huge processing plant, which I could only guess was some sort of cement factory. The landscape at this point was a contrast of pale grey dust, green valley and man-made structures: ...

Arequipa is the second largest city by population (approximately 900,000), and is located in the Andes in the southern part of Peru. It’s up fairly high, at an altitude of about 2300m, although taking the whole trip to Peru into account, that’s about half of the highest altitude that we reached. It has a nickname, “La Ciudad Blanca” (The White City), due to the fact that many of the buildings are constructed of a white volcanic rock. ...

This is the first of three parts of the photos from Peru. I think I honestly spent more time reworking my Lightroom to Flickr workflow (I’ve reuploaded photos to Flickr several times working it out), so now I should be able to get photos up online a lot faster. This is going on the assumption that I *feel* like doing it immediately after taking photos, which has always been rather hit-and-miss with me (ask Adriana). I guess I also spent a bit of time working on my new website, so if you went to the old daecks.blogspot.com and ended up here (you should have), welcome! ...

This last post regarding the honeymoon covers the couple of days we spent in Venice, and the subsequent drive down to Perugia via Bologna. We found Venice to be amazing, and loved wandering around the maze of buildings and water, not really caring when a dead-end was encountered. One of the very first things we checked off the list of things-to-do was a gondola ride: ...

Berlin Cathedral Neuschwanstein Castle Neuschwanstein Castle Berlin Wall Old mill near Nechern, where the Doecke side of my family came from Ampelmann Go! Ampelmann Stop! ...

Some photos have been online for a little while now. First up, France Night Light At the Louvre Eiffel Tower Eiffel View Mont Saint-Michel Beuvron-en-Auge Honfleur Abbaye de Jumièges Monaco photos are up here: ...