Two photos from Caribbean islands that will probably never look this way again.
Sandy Ground, St. Martin, February 2009:
Playa Negra, Vieques, Puerto Rico, November 2016:
I hope they can rebuild quickly.
Yesterday I posted a photo of the hotel I'm staying in. Apparently it caught my eye on my first trip to New Orleans, in December 2003:
Also, I didn't really take a lot of photos on the 2003 trip, presumably because the camera (a 1.8 Megapixel Nikon E2100) had limited storage.
More Scotland photos. On the 10th, we visited the Lagavulin Distillery. But we got our first look at it from the ferry two days earlier:
Up close, from the ruins of Dunyvaig Castle, it looks like this:
And for comparison between the LG G6 and the Canon 7D mark II, here's the camera-phone photo I took at about the same time:
I promised to post photos from Scotland once I had a chance to go through all 800 or so from my 7D, and today, I had a (short) chance.
First: the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, where we had breakfast on August 8th:
Second, Glenmachrie House, where we stayed:
(This is the reverse of the image I posted earlier, about an hour later, and with a real camera and HDR software.)
More tomorrow.
I first visited New York in July 1984, stopping by the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the 25th. I took a photograph of Georges de La Tour's "The Fortune Teller," painted sometime between 1620 and 1639:
Last month I visited again, on the 23rd—just two days shy of 33 years later:
Using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I have tried to get the photos to look as similar as possible. But my LG G6 phone and its 13 Megapixel camera just provides so much more data than the 4 Megapixel scan of the Kodachrome 64 slide, which itself has such constrained dynamic range, that the modern photo can't help but be clearer.
In fact, the narrow dynamic range of Kodachrome was one of its selling points. The trade-off was its deep, rich colors and detail—none of which a quick 4 MP scan can read.
If I have the opportunity, I'll re-scan the original slide and try again. For now, I leave the diptych above as a demonstration of how far photography has come since I was a kid.
For comparison, here's the reference image from the Met's website:
Today, after a 6 km walk through squelchy bogs from Ardbeg up to Solam, and a drive to Bowmore, we had dinner in Port Ellen just before sunset. This was the scene after dinner:
I've got 759 photos to get through when we get back to the US in a couple of days. Meanwhile, my phone camera seems to be doing an adequate job, as the shot above shows. I think my SLR will yield better results overall, but for holiday snaps, the phone doesn't suck. I like living in the future.
At the Bristol Renaissance Faire yesterday I caught my friend Megan trying on earrings:
Today, though, I'm getting on this gorgeous machine and flying to the Ancestral Homeland:
I'm also operating on about 4 hours of sleep, since my plan to wake up at 10:30am British Summer Time (4:30am Central Daylight Time) worked a lot better than my plan to go to sleep around 3am BST (9pm CDT). For that I thank the squad of Irish bros across the alley who had one of the louder parties I've ever witnessed until...well, there were still stragglers on the porch when I took out my trash at 5am.
I did get upgraded today, however, so at some point over the next couple of days I'll have a photo or two of Amercian's B787-8 business class.
It'll take some time to sort through the photos I took at the Bristol Renaissance Faire today, especially since I've got a 9am flight tomorrow and haven't really started packing yet.
This one, though. I mean, I had to post it:
In 30 years, this will be a much more interesting photograph:
Yesterday Parker turned 11, which means today brings his annual birthday portrait:
I am not sure why he prefers me to photograph his left side, but going back through earlier photos of him, clearly he does. For example, here's the runner-up for this year's portrait:
Not to mention, the 10-years-apart photos I posted May 4th.