Monday 31 March 2008

Egypt, Day 1

The winter/spring has been so cold, wet and horrible this year that I couldn't put up with it any longer and booked a week's holiday in Egypt and Jordan. Just to be somewhere warm!

Arrived in our Egyptian holiday resort (shudder!) by The Red Sea late in the evening, and this is the first thing that caught my eye.



OK, so it was a staircase in our building.



Got inside the room and saw that there is a balcony facing the Red Sea. Well, the sea is somewhere beyond the other building in front of ours. You can see some lights in the distance on the other side of The Red Sea (at least if you click on the photo to see a bigger version of it) - the distant lights are in Saudi Arabia, in fact.





Some other parts of the resort in our field of view from our balcony:



The weather was loooovely and warm, but very windy.



Wednesday 19 March 2008

Fishbourne Roman Palace

This is another backdated post. I happened to come across photos from this day while converting my Canon RAW files to PNG. It is recommended that one converts all proprietary RAW formats to Adobe's open format DNG, so that what I'm going to do to all my RAW files, both from the old Canon Powershot 3G and the EOS 350D. More about it here and here.

We were driving around Sussex again - this time went first to Fishbourne Roman Palace to see its wonderful mosaics.





You can see two different layers in this picture. Apparently they didn't like the existing pattern, so they laid a new mosaic on top of the old one on the floor of this room.





There are all kinds of tesserae they used. Fascinating, really.











To be honest, I was never that interested in mosaics, but the more I read about them, the more I became interested in the techniques and materials used.

But I think I'm more interested in nature - I was fascinated even by this odd-looking tree in the parking lot. It is March, but from looking at this tree you would think it was late autumn. (I've HDR-treated some of the following images.)



We drove on towards the coast, straight south from Chichester. I saw a windmill symbol on the map near Selsey, and after a few wrong turns, we found it.





...and her in the field just behind it.



The beach of Littlehampton.