The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Hiking in Dosso del Liro

Part of the reason one stays in an Agriturismo is to go hiking. This is a state highway (scala provincale) near the closest village:

Despite being as far north (46°27') as Quebec City and Portland, Ore., Dosso del Liro is surprisingly warm and dry, the perfect environment for these guys, which we saw all over:

These guys (common Italian wall lizards) are about 8 cm nose to tail, and very fast. We didn't even try to catch them. But they're also hard to photograph; I got lucky and moved very slowly for this shot.

Venice, Monday

I took 324 photos on Monday, so I'm not all the way through them yet. I'll just start with a photo of our hotel's lobby. We stayed at the Hotel Danieli, a 193-year-old hotel in a 600-year-old building:

This was our one hotel splurge. I do not know the exact bill, except that it was approximately the same as the next four nights' lodging combined.

Lightroom 6 / Surface compatibility

I'd have photos to post already, but Adobe Lightroom 6 keeps dying on my Surface. It works when I install it, but the next time I try to open it, even after a reboot, it gets to the splash screen and stops loading.

I hope to resolve this later today.

Revisiting another HDR photo

As I'm still getting to know Lightroom 6 and its HDR feature, I wanted to revisit this one from 2013:

Here's the refresh. I think it's a more subtle result, and looks more like what I actually saw in Hampstead Heath:

On my next trip (in two days), I'll probably take a lot more HDR-ready images. The Canon 7D Mark II does a sort-of draft HDR in-camera, with a number of options for generating the raw files that my old camera didn't have. I'm looking forward to the results.

Awed by the power of Craigslist

Less than 24 hours ago, I put my old camera on Craigslist: $500 for the body, two old lenses, the battery pack and charger, and a 32 GB CF card.

This afternoon, someone stopped by my office, played with the camera for five minutes, handed me $450 in cash, and that was it.

Thank you, Craig. That was remarkably painless.

More HDR fun with Lightroom

I'm not sure this produced a significantly different photo, but I've done another quick HDR image with Lightroom. First, the basic shot, posted the day after my visit to the Joint Security Area on the North-South Korean border:

Here's the first HDR attempt posted a week later:

And here's one with Lightroom 6:

The second HDRI used different source images, but only from a few seconds later. Are they significantly different? Maybe insignificantly? I must ponder...