Austria: Eng, Jul 2010 (64 pics)

For more information: Almdorf Eng.

Manarola, Cinque Terre

Places where we have been are marked in this map:

View Trip to Cinque Terre in a larger map

If you are looking for a very nice, comfortable but still affordable flat in Levanto, we can highly recommend Terrace up in Ridarolo. Beside a great view over the hills and a calm place it is also assured that you will not gain weight while enjoying the Italian cuisine …

As image processing and management software I am using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (meanwhile in version 2.4, still looking for an adequate Open Source alternative).

One thing I like about Lightroom is the easy, fast and integrated way to create web galleries out of your photo collections. What I was missing so far was a way to link back from a certain flash web gallery to my gallery overview and to the main page of my blog.

I found a really useful description for that purpose over at Bluefire Blog, that also has dozens of tips and tricks about how to customize the Lightroom Flash Galleries.

To add a link back to my gallery overview, I could just use the GUI of Lightroom and enter the needed data in the Web-tab as shown in this screenshot.

To use the gallery title to link back to the main page of my blog, I had to manually edit the file group.xml that was located in the subdirectory /resources/mediaGroupData/ of the gallery’s root. There I had to change the tag

<siteTitle>apfelkraut.org</siteTitle>

to

<siteTitle>
<a href="http://www.apfelkraut.org">apfelkraut.org</a>
</siteTitle>

That’s it! Be sure that you test the links in their domain, normally meaning directly on your website. If the modified gallery is used in a domain that is different to the domain you linked to, the links will be underlined and clickable but nothing more will happen. The actual links will not work. This is due to a security feature in recent Adobe Flash implementations. For details about this behaviour and how to change it see this TechNote from Adobe.

Needless to say to a professional web programmer … do not forget to clear your browser’s cache in case you changed something. I’ve heard of people searching for hours for a failure that was only caused by the browser loading an outdated file from its cache …

My gallery is available here. Enjoy!

Für mehr Informationen:

• offizielle Seite
• Der Trommler und Pfeiffer-Blog
• HallooLaHo-Blog
• Eintrag auf de.wikipedia.org
• Eintrag auf en.wikipedia.org

• Saigon and Mekong Delta (164 pics)
• Mui Ne, Hoi An and My Son (160 pics)
• Hanoi, Bai Tu Long Bay and Red River Delta (159 pics)
• Bangkok (50 pics)

Nearly all places where we have been are marked in this map:

View Larger Map

For people going to Viet Nam, we would highly recommend these places to stay:

• Saigon: Guest House California, Tel.: +84 8 38378885, eMail: guesthousecaliforniasaigon at yahoo.com
• Mui Ne: Lucy Resort
• Hoi An: Thanh Binh II Hotel
• Hanoi: Prince II Hotel

We had a great time on trips of these companies, especially because they have been offside of all these tourist trails:

• Cham Island Divers
• Ethnic Travel Viet Nam

This is one of my first experiments in the field of tilt-shift photography. The expert eye will have recognized immediately that this seems to be a photo of a miniature model of Ålesund … actually it is not, it was just faked to look like one

Better examples of this technique can be found at smashingmagazine.com. You can create your own tiltshift photographies at tiltshiftmaker.com.

If GIMP is your favorite image manipulation program, there are several tutorials available: In English at Gimparoo!, at Andrew’s Home On The Web, another one with a more advanced technique at Rob A’s (Im)personal Blog and in German at Fothema.de. The “Focus Blur plug-in” appears to be a quite good alternative in case you are not satisfied with the standard Gaussian blur filter of GIMP.

For Photoshop there are also several tutorials online: (1), (2), (3). The Cleverest has an interesting comparison of a real tilt-shift lens vs. faking this effect with Photoshop.

(found via Drawn!, “Tiltshift photography”)

Places where we have been are marked in this map:

View Larger Map

Camping sites that we can highly recommend are:

• Nymoen Leirplass in Skjolden
• Prinsen Strandcamping next to Ålesund
• Botnen Camping next to Brekke, Sognefjorden
• Skogtun Turistheim og Camping next to Bergen

… not only because of the perfect view you will have from your tent!

For more information: Norsk Camping Guide.

If you like vintage photos than The Commons could be worth a click.

It is a pilot project of the U.S. Library of Congress. They digitized images from their collections that have no known copyright restrictions and uploaded them to flickr.com.

With the help of the community they hope to increase the value of this collection. By adding tags and comments the users should make it better search- and reusable and add supplementary information.

There are two sets available:

• “News in the 1910s”: black-and-white photos of the Bain News Service.
• “1930s-40s in Color”: color photos taken by the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information.

Even though the description may not sound so interesting, the images are really worth taking a look.

for more information:
“Flickr Takes Historical Imagery To The Masses” at TechCrunch.com
“My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven” at the Library of Congress Blog

There is a similar approach of the National Library of Australia, which is available at Picture Australia.