I got a cut and color today. It’s the first time I’ve every colored my hair. It was getting full of quite a bit of white. For inquiring minds here it the new look:

It was called Light Brown. Lots of people are commenting on how the like it but I am thinking it is darker than what I want.

Click here to view this photo book.

We started in Florence, Italy taking in Brunelleschi’s dome for the Duomo of Florence, Santa Maria del Fior. The cathedral complex includes the Baptistry and Giotto’s Campanile.

We also did a lot of walking the streets of Florence and visiting the Uffizi Gallery, one of the oldest and most famous art museums in the world which is housed in the Palazzo degli Uffizi.

One of my favorite aspects about being in Italy (and France) was eating Gelato every day - OK, maybe twice per day. Gelato stores are readily available with an incredible array of flavors.

From Florence we took the train to Vernazza. On the way, we stopped at the quiet Renaissance town of Lucca, which still has its city walls intact. Much different from the chaos of Florence!

Maybe my favorite time on the whole trip was the two nights in Vernazza and the wonderful Cinque Terra. There’s only one real street in Vernazza where cars and trucks come down in the morning for deliveries. The rest of the day it and the side alleys all over town are pedestrian areas. This is the “road”/alley to our room in Vernazza.

One day we hiked the Cinque Terre trail from Vernazza to Monterosso al Mare. Then, we rode the train to the far end of the hike, Riomaggiore and walked back to Vernazza. The trail was easier in some areas than others. The hardest parts were the thin terraced trail from Vernazza to Monterosso and the climb up the 450 steps to the hill town of Corniglia. The views at every turn were fabulous and worth all the effort.

Corniglia

Vernazza

Every day we ate a simple breakfast that we bought ourselves at a local store. We usually ate croissants, another bread item and orange juice. Lunch was often eaten quickly while we were changing trains or hiking. It was usually a hearty bread with meat and cheese. Dinner was always at an outdoor cafe. The weather was always perfect for an outdoor meal.

Cafe in Nimes, France

From Italy we spent a long day traveling to Avignon, France. We took a trip to Nimes to see some Roman ruins including the Colosseum.

In Avignon we visited the Pope’s Palace, the Pont d’Avignon and the city park. The old city is surrounded by a wall such as seen in this photo.

We also visited the laundromat in Avignon, figuring out how to read French directions and use the machines.

Next, we visited Arles, France - just a bit south of Avignon. There were Roman ruins there as well as a Colosseum. We got to enter this Colosseum and see it from the inside as well. The outside is being restored. Look at this picture. Can you tell which side has been restored?!

We headed back to the southern coast and visited Cassis, France. Here’s the view of the harbor from our hotel balcony. The Mediterranean sea is to the right.

Our goal in Cassis was to relax and visit the Calanques. We had planned to hike but our tired feet needed a rest so we took a boat tour instead to visit the calanques.

We set off next for Nice, France. We were derailed by a French train strike. We had to be re-routed and the trip took longer than planned. The main consequence of this was that 1) we didn’t get to go to Monaco and 2) we were getting really tired of train travel.

Nice had a great old town with a wonderful market.

The promenade in Nice is also a great way to walk and view the ocean.

From Nice we took the narrow gauge railroad Chemins de Fer de Provence to the medieval looking town of Entrevaux in the French Alps. We climbed the 500 feet uphill to the old citadel.

Today is our anniversary. Happy 20 years!!!

In this photo we are standing on the bridge over the Var river, which is the access to the town of Entrevaux.

When we exited the back of the citadel, we found a marked trail. We decided to do some hiking and followed the trail about another 500 feet uphill. We had a great view of the Var river and the countryside around it.

We finished our trip by returning to Italy. We spent a day in Milan, shopping for gifts, walking the shopping district and climbing to the top of the gothic Duomo.

We had a great vacation. It was tiring but we saw lots of cool things and ate great food. Our airplane ride home was the most disappointing part of the trip. One piece of Mike’s luggage got left in Italy by the airlines and we had to wait 3 hours in D.C. for a thunderstorm to pass. We got home at 10:30 p.m., very tired. The girls were very happy to see us return. Jennifer would not let go of me when she hugged me at the airport. It is nice to be missed.

These are 21 of the over 400 photographs I saved from the trip. Happy scrapping to come!

]]> http://www.gormish.org/denise/?feed=rss2&p=993 http://www.gormish.org/denise/?p=1028 http://www.gormish.org/denise/?p=1028#comments Sun, 03 May 2009 13:11:28 +0000 denise http://www.gormish.org/denise/?p=1028

Auld Sod Red Magic Merlin CGC CD OA OAJ OAC NJC
“Merlin”

November 6, 1993 - May 2, 2009

A wonderful companion for myself and my family for 15 years.

I will always remember the uncontainable excitement and sparkle in his eyes when we played fetch.

I will always remember his willingness (and patience with me) in doing all these strange things (tracking, obedience and agility) that I asked of him.

I will always remember his desire to be with me for a walk or just lounging around the house.

To live on in our hearts and minds forever…

You are deeply missed.

In one layout, we used the same font for the journaling and title. I used Helvetica here.

In another layout, we contrasted the size of the type in the title.

I took this using the self-timer on my digital SLR. I propped it up on a table and leaned over on the floor to get the shot.

The rules of this tag are:

Take a picture of your self right now, no primping or preparing. Just snap a picture.
Load onto your blog.
Tag 3 people to play…remember if you are tagged on another blog we will all be heading to yours to see if you played along.

I’m tagging Ramona, Tracy and Donna

Another week goes by. Can you believe it’s February already?

Once again, the question came up on a scrapbook message board - should I shot in JPEG or RAW? I am in the very small group that shots JPEG.

Feeling I might be missing something, I ran an experiment today. I took several photos of the same object on our hike. According to my camera’s histogram they were good images in terms of lighting. I took a high quality JPEG image then a RAW image of the exact same thing with my digital SLR camera.

I uploaded them to iPhoto, then opened them in Adobe Photoshop. These are the images Straight Out of The Camera:

One is RAW and one is JPEG. The RAW image in 7.3 MB while the JPEG is 3.2 MB. That’s quite a bit of memory differential.

In the top image the sky is bluer than IRL. The bottom one is more accurate in the yellow but a little washed out in the green. Both needed editing. For both I darkened things a bit and added some contrast in the midtones. It took about 1 minute to edit each one. The one on the bottom though - the RAW one - is more true to what we really saw with our eyes.

Two photographs of a bridge with bright sunshine and shade. The top one has correct color and great sharpness. The bottom one is washed out and dull. The top one (JPEG) needed no corrections. The bottom one (RAW) needed the blackest areas to be more black and lightened in the midtones. It also needed sharpening. Again the RAW image is almost twice as large as the JPEG.

Same as above. The bottom image (RAW) is washed out and needs the same correction. The contrast in the JPEG is outstanding.

I understand that RAW images do need to be edited. They are not meant to be taken straight out of the camera without any editing. I did edit the RAW photos in Adobe Photoshop. But what I found is that the quality of the edited JPEG did not exceed what I got straight out of the camera from the JPEG image.

I decided I needed to take some really bad photos (bad lighting) and see which made a better improvement. To be honest, it didn’t matter. A bad photo is a bad photo.

From my experiment with seeing what came straight out of the camera and what I got from editing the RAW files I can feel fine taking my photos in JPEG. The advantages of good high quality images, the time saved for not having to edit every file, the smaller file size and a format (JPEG) that I know will be around longer than probably my camera’s RAW format convinces me to go with JPEG.

This is my camera, my software and my results. I would suggest trying a similar experiment with your own camera and software.

Regardless of your choice to shot in RAW or JPEG, I would highly recommend saving a copy of your image in JPEG. Your camera’s RAW format may not be around in 5 or 10 years. JPEG will. Or maybe your future computer or operating system won’t support your RAW program. But it will support JPEG. I’d hate to see you lose your precious memories.

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