Day 1: Getting Lost In Montreal

by | Sep 29, 2023 | Photography

I am starting this post at 4:15 in the afternoon on our first full day in Montreal. It’s not even dinner time and we are exhausted already. Kathleen is taking a well-deserved nap and I am writing about today.

This morning I did my usual pre-dawn photo walk, and I knew exactly where I wanted to walk even before I got here. The only problem was, neither Google Maps nor Apple’s maps could figure it out. We are staying at the Homewood Suites by Hilton at the base of Montreal’s Chinatown. I wanted to walk to the Belvedere Kondiaronk Lookout which is up above all of Montreal. That’s where I shot the photo at the top of this page. The only problem was, that both map apps wanted me to take the long way to get there. Proof of this is that it only took me 40 minutes to walk back but it took me almost two hours to find the place. Two hours of walking up hiking trails in the dark. And then being sent backward and forward on the same trails, again and again being told to “take the path on the right,” when there was no path. So I would continue the way I was going and then be told, “Go Back!”

The best thing I can do to show you my frustration is to show you what the app Map My Walk showed me I had done. It uses GPS to show me exactly where I walk each day. Here’s my overall route.

See the part between the two and the three-mile marks? Those were on tiny trails in the pitch-black darkness, using my phone’s flashlight to see where I was going. See the five and six-mile markers? That’s the way I should have been going. I was trying to get somewhere near the five on the map but couldn’t figure out where to go. Finally, a very nice jogger (whom I had already passed twice) said she would show me, and I got there. Late! I had purposely left early enough at 5:15 a.m. to be on the lookout by 6:30 for the sunrise. I got there around 7:15, and I was NOT happy about it. I got photos of the view, but I really wanted that golden hour light. Oh, well. The sky was not that great this morning anyway, and once there, I did make it back a lot easier than I went up.

Here are the photos I took from the top with captions. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Once back, I ran into my brother and Jamie getting out of the elevator. They had not gotten in until midnight the night before (lousy connections in MSP). I showered and changed as quickly as I could, and we went down and had breakfast with them. It was great seeing them and introducing them to Jocelyn.

Since I am already a day behind, I am going to stop this here and give you the rest of day two tomorrow. We have that canceled port in a few days that is now a sea day that will give me a chance to catch up. I am writing this on Friday morning, and we are packing up to head to the ship, but I want to put it online today before we go. Once we are on board, we have another full day in Montreal before setting sail for Quebec City on Saturday evening.

Not all those who wander are lost.  —J.R.R Tolkien

 

At last—my complete Travel Photography Portfolio

by | Jun 4, 2023 | Photography

Just a quick post to point out a new page on this site. If you look above this post, you will see a menu. On the far right side is a new item that says, My Photographic Portfolio. If you click it, you will find a page with my 23 (I know, it’s a stupid number, but I just could not whittle them down any further) favorite photos.

You will also find links to ALL my other travel photos. I have divided my best photos into three pages; photos I have taken in the United States, photos I have taken in Europe and photos I have taken in the rest of the world. Inside those pages, you will find galleries by country, state or region. This is a project I have had on my to-do list for more than a year. When I tell people here in Trilogy that I am a travel photographer, they ask me where they can find my photos. Up until today, I didn’t have one place where they all are. Now I do. Enjoy.

And of course, this comes with the usual reminder: Don’t forget, if you click the first shot of any of the galleries, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see. — Gilbert K. Chesterton.

The travel photographer sees it all and brings it home.  — Jim Bellomo

My Best Photos of 2022

by | Dec 31, 2022 | Photography

Here we are on the last day of the year, and I only have one post left to do to wrap up 2022. Since I consider this site a travel and photography blog, I have saved my best photos post for last. And they are all travel photos so that kind of fits.

I wanted to do a David Letterman and give you a Top-Ten list, but I could only narrow it down to 14, and I need some of you to tell me which ones you like better. I shot a bunch of photos this year across two continents in seven different countries and all while traveling. I had some fantastic photo experiences, the best being in Venice and Tarragona, Spain, but I loved the other shots I got as well. So please let me know in the comments which ones I ranked differently than you would have.

Just a note: If you click on any of the photos, they will enlarge on a black background to fill your screen. That’s the best way to view them. And PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Number 14—The magazine ad from Eze, France

I took this from way up on the top of the village of Eze, a true hilltop town in the south of France between Nice and Monaco. When I got back to our stateroom and was going through my photos, I realized that I had taken an advertising photo. Is this not the perfect photo to illustrate any advertisement for the south of France?

Number 13—The view from the Number Two

Floating down the Grand Canal in Venice at 5:45 in the morning, I looked back and saw this view behind the #2 vaporetto I was traveling on. I stepped out onto the back deck and got this shot of Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute and the sky behind us, and I loved the light I got.

Numbers 11 & 12—My two best people photos

I have a bunch of people photos from this year, but I love these two the most. The first is from Corfu. We had gone on a shore excursion that took us to Olympia in Greece and then to a hotel where they did some cooking demos and lunch. After lunch, this wonderful man and his family did some amazing Greek dancing. ‘He was incredibly animated and he really played to my camera.

The second shot, from only two days before, is our guide George who took us all over Athens and then found us the best lunch in the world. I loved his quiet confidence in this shot. He was the perfect guide for us.

Number 10—A flamingo on Grand Turk Island

If you look back on my Top Photos of 2021, what I considered my best photo was a shot of a flamingo I took while we were in the Galapagos Islands. There is something about these birds; they are both majestic and awkward all at the same time. The reflection made this shot. And the really amazing thing is that I shot it from a tour bus at about 30mph.

Number 9—The money shot in Cinque Terre

This is incredible Manarola, one of the five villages that make up the Cinque Terre on Italy’s eastern coast. We were visiting for the day on a tour with the amazing Luigi. We were going from village to village via the ferry. When we arrived in our second stop, Manarola, Luigi told me that I wanted THE quintessential Cinque Terre shot, I would need to climb this particular hill and then look back. He was right. This shot, of the more than 600 I took that day, says it all. It’s the postcard shot.

Number 8—The Columbia Bar, Astoria, Oregon

This one is my most peaceful shot of 2022. I love the way the spray and the water “humps” are just flowing. The lighthouse in the background helps as well. But conversely, this is really a pretty violent photo because, as anyone who has lived in the northwest can tell you, the Columbia Bar (where the Columbia River enters the Pacific Ocean) can be VERY dangerous. Lots of ships have been wrecked trying to sail through these waters.

Numbers 6 & 7—Wedding pics in Venice

Walking into Piazza San Marco in Venice at just before 6:00 am and finding the entire piazza empty except for these three people almost took my breath away. I had been there the afternoon before, and the crowds had been immense, smothering and overwhelming. To walk into the piazza and find this couple and their photographer taking photos right at dawn was like a miracle for me. But I can’t decide which one is my favorite, so this is another chance for you to pick.

Number 5—My best panoramic shot of 2022

This is a manufactured panoramic shot I took while in an indoor shopping center in Naples, Italy. I love taking panoramic photos. Not the kind you get with your iPhone but this kind. Ones where I plant my feet and move the camera by pivoting my upper body as I take a series of shots. Then I take them back into Photoshop and stitch them together to create what I was seeing from where I was standing at the time. This shot is one of the few vertical panoramas I have taken. I started as three vertical shots. If I have any complaints with it, it is that it seems slightly tilted to me and when I try and fix that, it only looks like it is tilted in the other direction. But I still love it.

Number 4—A hole to the sky in Barcelona, Spain

We were on a tour in Barcelona, Spain, and we had stopped to see Gaudi’s La Pedrera—Casa Mila. This is a multi-story building that initially housed two condominium-type dwellings for two fairly wealthy families in the early 1900s. Just before we took the elevator up to the top floor to work our way down, I leaned out into the center of the building and took this shot, looking straight up the shaft that is the inner courtyard. I had no idea it would turn out this good. And it really helped to have amazing weather, so I had the blue (with wisps of clouds for contrast) sky.

Number 3—The lights of Kotor, Montenegro

Someday I will blow this shot up and hang it on a wall. It might be the best nighttime shot I have ever taken. We were in Kotor on our Viking Sky cruise. During the day (while Kathleen was quarantined due to Viking giving her food poisoning), I hiked up this mountain/hill and took many great photos looking back. I was so impressed with the city. Luckily for me, the ship did not sail away from the city until fairly late that night. We were in our stateroom watching another episode of Downton Abbey (what else do you watch on a Viking ship ?) when I happened to look at the bow cam on our TV and saw this scene. I literally grabbed my camera and ran to the front (and top) of the ship to get this photo of the entire town lit up, including the old fortress that protected the city. I have to give huge credit to my new Nikon z7 being able to get me a shot this clear when I handheld it at 1/20th of a second. Amazing.

Number 2—Man eating breakfast in Venice, Italy

My favorite (and I believe the best) photo I have ever taken was a shot like this. It told a story. You can see that one here. This one does the same thing for me. I was up early in Venice and pretty much lost and wandering the calles and campos I turned a corner, and there in the distance was a man having breakfast. And just like my best photo, this one was all about the light. Or, in this case, the lack of it. What light exists does exactly what I want it to do, it send my eye directly to the subject. No photographer could ask for more.

Number 1—The blue hour (actually about 15 minutes) in Venice

Lots of people know about the “golden hour” of photography. It’s that time just before sunrise or after sunset when the sky turns golden. What you may not have heard of before is the term “blue hour.” This really isn’t an hour but it’s the 15-20 minutes just before or after the golden hour. The sky is transitioning from the black of night to the golds, oranges and pinks of the sunrise. If you get lucky and do some planning, you can be in the right place (standing on the Rialto bridge) at the right time (the blue hour) to get the shot you want.

So that’s it. Another year of photography behind me. I like to think that I get better each year. Retirement, or at least cutting back on work and being able to focus a little more on taking pictures, has helped me improve. Sitting here writing this at 4:00 am on New Year’s Eve I feel really good about the shots I got in 2022. Can’t wait to see what I put in my post a year from now.

Happy New Year! Hope we all have an awesome 2023.

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.      —Dorothea Lange

 

The best and worst of 2022

by | Dec 30, 2022 | Uncategorized

To quote Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Isn’t that just the way life works? I always thought so. How would you know what the highs were if you didn’t have any lows? And sometimes, the lows lead to the highs. This brings me to the high and low of 2022.

To start the year, a quick substitution was just what we needed.

This one kind of slips in from 2021. If you have followed this blog for a while, you know that we booked a Christmas Market river cruise with Viking River Cruises that was expected to sail in early December 2020. Well, we all know that didn’t happen, so we postponed to December 2021, but then the Delta variant of COVID showed up just before Christmas. Even though Viking still sailed the cruise, we let them keep our money for another year because most of Europe shut down their Christmas Markets. But that second cancellation killed us. And that’s how we ended 2021.

But that brought us to one of the high points of 2022—our Sail with Seth cruise on Holland America’s Nieuw Statendam that we booked as a quick replacement. We went with my brother and sister-in-law and had a Neptune Suite (a last-minute upgrade), some incredible food, found new parts of the Caribbean that I actually liked (Bonaire and Grand Turk) and just generally had a great time.

Old condo problems lead to a new home that we LOVE.

Our disillusionment with our former homeowner’s association started a long time before Spring 2022, but that’s when things went from bad to…we have to get the hell out of here. We had lived in our condo for 23 years (two months before we got married), and to be honest, we really loved living there. So we made the decision to start looking for a new place. To be totally honest, I was sure I would never leave that place and making the decision to move from our close-in, easy-to-walk-anywhere condo where we had the best neighbors anyone could ever want was both tough and quick.

Kathleen and I have always made joint decisions quickly. When we bought our condo back in 1999, we weren’t even looking. We just stopped to see an interesting model home, liked what we saw, went for coffee for half an hour and then went back and bought it. Moving this year was no different. We already knew the area we wanted to move to (Trilogy Redmond Ridge, a 55+ community about seven miles from our condo), and we found an awesome realtor (Hi Linda) who took us to see a grand total of one house—the one I am sitting in right now. We walked in, looked around for about 15 minutes and told Linda to make an offer. Then we went and looked at another place so that we could see what else was out there but to be honest; it could have been wonderful (it wasn’t); we still would have bought the one we now call home.

We love living here! And I would say this was the best thing that happened to us this year. Of course, there is always a downside. We had two big downsides. One, we had to leave behind the world’s best neighbors, Jayesh and Lisa. Sure, they are only 15 minutes away (we are having our annual New Year’s Eve dinner with them on Saturday), but it’s not the same as sticking our head over the fence or having drinks on the spur of the moment to celebrate that it’s Friday. And two, we actually had to pack and move. But that’s another of this year’s highlights.

A Moving Experience

I hate moving. In my past life (BK=Before Kathleen), I moved a bunch. But since we bought our condo in 1999, we haven’t moved. Not for 23 years. The idea of taking things down off our walls, packing all our belongings, dealing with multiple trips to and from the new house, getting the condo ready for sale, and getting all the stuff done we would have to do to move into the new house…I hated all of it. But sometimes, good things come from bad things. Like the day in April when all our kids and grandkids showed up to help us patch walls, touch up paint and clean our old place to get it ready to sell. It makes a dad and grandpa very happy to have his entire family coming together to help.

Unless you have been to our house, you have no idea how much art we have hanging on our walls. Just the downstairs powder room alone had 84 framed pieces of art on the walls. We know because Maylee (our awesome granddaughter) counted them for us. And in our kitchen, we had more than 60  decorative plates hanging on the soffit. Those all had to come down, have the holes spackled and then have the paint touched up. There were other things that needed doing, including moving a bunch of stuff to a storage shed. But everyone pitched in to help, and we got it all done. Special thanks to our eight-year-old (at the time) granddaughter and our eleven-year-old grandson because we struggled to figure out what to have them do, and they just grabbed the spackle and the paint and went for it. They did an awesome job.

We should add that they all returned again a month later to help us move out of the condo and into our new house. And all of them worked their butts off that day as well. As I said, it brings a tear to this old grandpa’s heart.

Our travels: some good and some bad

As I mentioned at the top of this post, we had a great time in the Caribbean on Nieuw Statendam in January; then, we sailed on a May cruise on Celebrity Millenium from San Diego to Vancouver, BC. And we had our BIG trip of the year—our Viking Ocean Mediterranean cruise from Athens to Barcelona that took us to Europe for almost a full month.

Since I have detailed so much of this travel before, I will just list the tops and bottoms of that travel:

The WORST parts

  • Kathleen falling and breaking her elbow when we were in San Francisco on the Millenium cruise. Six hours in the emergency room, two long cab rides, one surgery and about ten weeks of recovery, all while we were moving, was not fun. All of this happening on a cruise that proved to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that our favorite cruise line (Celebrity) was not what it used to be and that this might have been the worst cruise we had been on in years. It is just sad.
  • Catching COVID in Venice or at least realizing we had COVID while we were in Venice. No awful symptoms (just a slight sore throat), but still a pain. Kathleen’s cough went on for a month.
  • Kathleen getting food poisoning on Viking Sky and then being quarantined because of something the cruise line did.
  • Us realizing that 28 days is too long to be gone from home.
  • Being on Nieuw Statendam with our good friend Seth (Sail with Seth) and finding out from him that he had been let go from Holland America on the day before the cruise, with his last day being in July. That was not cool, HAL. They then expected him to do his job helping the sixty or so people in the Sail with Seth group have a fun time.

The BEST parts

  • Most of our Viking Sky cruise around the Mediterranean was great. We had a great time, and we enjoyed Viking, but our expectations were a little too high.
  • I had at least two ultra-amazing photo-shooting experiences, one in Venice and one in Tarragona, Spain.
  • We spent another amazing five days with the grandkids at the beach (we have been doing this for a few summers), celebrated Maylee’s birthday and played MULTIPLE games of Skipbo.
  • Going back to Amsterdam and the Banks Mansion.

Hopefully, I will be back tomorrow to finish the year with my best photos.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.
—Bob Marley

 

 

I hate it when this happens–but you get more panoramic photos to look at

by | Dec 20, 2022 | Photography

Yesterday I was sitting on the couch working on yesterday’s post about panoramic photos. About halfway through uploading photos, I had to make dinner, so I thought I was saving the page, but the actual button I hit was “Publish.” When I hit that, WordPress (where I host my website) sends out an e-mail, and that’s it. I can make changes to the post, but you won’t be notified when I do.

The problem was, I still had a BUNCH of pano photos I still wanted to post. So here they are, and hopefully, you will appreciate them. I have never been able to post them in the past in my daily travel pics on Instagram or Facebook because they won’t let me add them and show you the entire photo. You only get the middle part. I hope you enjoy them. Make sure to open them up on the biggest screen you have. Otherwise, you won’t get their full impact. 

These first two are special as they depict the same scene, just taken from two different angles. I was standing in the same spot. In the first one, I started on the left with one ship in view and moved to the right until I had done almost a 360-degree turn. On the second one, I started with both ships in view and moved to the right. The first one is a BUNCH of pics stitched together.

Here are a few more with comments. And of course…don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. (If you have to, make sure to at least turn it sideways to view them horizontally.)

These next four are from our recent visit to Barcelona, Spain

Here’s some from our stop in Dubrovnik, Croatia. I climbed the walls that day and walk all around the city, so lots of chances for panorama photos.

Those seem to be the only multiples I have left, so here’s the rest with captions.

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.  —Theodore Roosevelt