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There are multiple museums inside the Tower of London, including one devoted to weapons and armor. I liked the pose of this one, standing with the hands clasped rather than just hanging on the stand.
In the comments to my last post, Mindstalk asked:
So what does editing consist of? Are you doing major adjustments to each picture, or eyeballing each one for need for any editing, or doing batch edits?
The answer is long enough that I figured it deserved a post of its own.
First of all: no batch editing, in the sense of selecting ten or a hundred pictures and saying “Lightroom, do the following to all of them.” It wouldn’t work: what each picture needs is individual, so I’d just end up changing whatever I had done. Instead, my workflow goes roughly like this.
I should mention that one of the reasons I’m doing the Year in Pictures project is to blackmail myself into finishing the task of processing all of my photos. After all, if I don’t get through Poland/last month’s Monterey trip/my eight million cemetery pictures from London, you all will never get to see the best of them! And that would be a tragedy.
So how many photos do I have, anyway?
Well. For various reasons, I have photos in my Lightroom catalogue that I didn’t take, which therefore will not be making it into the Year in Pictures set. (Though I’m having to edit some of those, too. And someday, when I’m done with my own stuff, my husband is probably going to make sad eyes at me to edit his pictures, and there are . . . quite a lot of those, let’s say. Some of which are in here already, some of which aren’t.) Stuff in Lightroom That Isn’t Mine = 2132 pictures.
Stuff in Lightroom That Is Mine = 7794 pictures.
Which is a fair-sized stack.
But! I have been working assiduously to get through these! I am pleased to say that after a recent push (in which I finished off my honeymoon, our visit to the Queen Mary down in L.A., and another day of Poland), I have reduced the number which still need editing to the low, low sum of 1361.
. . . this is about the point at which I say “oh god, I’m doomed.”
I’m making progress, really I am. In fact, I’ve done more than the 6433 photos it looks like, because part of the process involves deleting pictures that aren’t that good or duplicate other photos of better quality. I don’t know exactly how many I started with, but I’ve probably deleted two thousand, maybe even more. Certainly more, if I count my first-pass cull of the England/France trip last fall, since that whacked a good thousand out of the total on the spot. So while the current numbers say I’m about 83% done, I’m actually doing much better than that. Still and all: I have a long way to go before I’ll have finished climbing Mt. Lightroom. (And it doesn’t help that I keep taking more. bloody. photos.)
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So I have, like, eighty billion pictures of Stonehenge. There’s a path that makes a loop around the site, and I kept taking shots from different angles, trying to figure out how to frame it well. Every angle presents something new. This one, I think, is pretty classic.
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Being in Kyoto in August meant sweating to death in the heat — but it also meant that several temples had night openings, lighting up their structures and gardens. The effect was absolutely beautiful. This particular stone lantern was at Kiyomizudera, which I hope to see in daylight someday. π
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Notre Dame is packed to the gills with various monuments and such in its side chapels. I particularly liked this one, silhouetted against the stained glass behind.
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The “backwaters” of Kerala are a region of canals, where locals get around by canoe. My husband and I went down there to spend a day and a night on one of the houseboats that ply the area, and it was one of the most beautifully relaxing experiences I’ve had in years.
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This is one of the Parthenon sculptural fragments in the British Museum, along with the famous friezes. When part of an entire horse, I imagine it was impressive; on its own, it’s a little freaky. (And calls to mind a certain scene from The Godfather.)
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The day we went to the Louvre, we decided to get dinner in the vicinity and come back after dark to see if we could get any cool night-time shots.
We came back and found the full moon rising over the Louvre. So, um, yes.
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Bamboo forests are also awesome.
That is all.
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One advantage of it being rainy the day I first went to the San Francisco Tea Garden was, there was hardly anyone there. Normally this bridge is crawling with people, because the sides of it are like a ladder (therefore entertaining) and it’s a good place to have your picture taken. But in the rain, it becomes more serene.
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The entire exterior of Halebidu is covered in carving and sculpture, some of it in better condition than others. Another visitor had placed this flower where the statue’s head ought to be, which made for a rather striking image.
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Along the Thames Embankment, at the base of the obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle, there are two sphinxes. I was pleased by the juxtaposition between the old and the new here, with the London Eye in the background. (This photo was taken during my research trip for With Fate Conspire.)
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Redwood forests? Are awesome.
That is all.
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My parents should have their fortieth wedding anniversary more often. π
In January 2012, to celebrate my parents’ anniversary, my father flew my entire family out to Hawai’i for a long vacation. So while much of the U.S. was mired in snow, and even California was chilly and damp, this garden was just outside my hotel door. I couldn’t really complain . . . .
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Ganesha is a popular Hindu deity, particularly known for his connection with obstacles, particularly the removal thereof. As such, you find images of him everywhere. This one was sitting somewhat randomly in the park behind the Halebidu temple in Kerala; it was not the only piece of sculpture that seemed to have been parked out there until the people maintaining the temple decided what to do with it.
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Shrines in Japan have fountains at which you are expected to purify yourself (by pouring water over your hands at a minimum). Some of them are pretty plain, but others — such as this one at Fushimi Inari — are sculpted in awesome ways. Inari, being associated with foxes, naturally gets a fox fountain.
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I feel rather bad for the lions in these murals (which are hung in the British Museum). But the murals themselves are splendid: a whole series of Assyrian works, depicting warfare and a royal lion hunt, full of action and excitement. They aren’t easy to photograph — the images run on continually, making it hard to choose a useful framing — but the diagonal line of this one worked out well, I think.
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A lot of temples in Japan are built on a traditional format, involving lots of wood and ribbed roof tiles and the usual thing you see in photos. Every so often, though, you find one that’s . . . different. Like this one, where the roof is carved to look like a giant turtle, with Kannon riding its back and a bunch of children looking up at her adoringly. This is the head of that turtle, and it’s really just . . . odd, man. π
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I’ve had a soft spot for sailing ever since I went on a trip with my family and some family friends to the British Virgin Islands. We chartered a 40′ sloop and went sailing around for about a week, I think, and I’ve never forgiven myself for being nine at the time and not appreciating it the way I would now. π Anyway, this photo was taken off the coast of O’ahu, and really, it’s all about the light.
