Kurt Johnson

Photos from our weekend in NM.

Photos from Mesa Verde, Durango, and Silverton.

Photos from Oregon.

Election day in Saigon; families were required to fly the flag.

I’ll post notes on Vietnam shortly but in the meantime some of myphotos are up:

• Saigon
• Mekong Delta (Can Tho, Vinh Long, My Tho)
• Hoi An
• Hue
• Hanoi

The first of two albums from Cambodia is here. I am  now in Hoi An, Vietnam.

Kids on Cambodia’s Ton Le Sap Lake rowing over to sell us bananas; they are part of a community of ethnic Vietnamese who live on the water.  See EXIF data and an aerial view of the village

Kids spending a school day on the bank of the Mekong

I’ve put together a couple of photo albums from our time in the country:

1. River stuff
2. Off the river

One of the Hmong night markets in Luang Prabang

Two more albums of Bangkok photos are up:

• Wat Pho
• Bangkok (other than temples)

My album from the Grand Palace and co-located Wat Phra Kaew is here.  This was the highlight of our visits to temples in Bangkok, despite the fact that it was about 900 million degrees in the sun; at least one visitor fainted from the heat while we were there.

Link to album 

These photos are amazing. 

• http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20041223_1.htm
• http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20041224_1.htm
• http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20041226_1.htm

 I don't know who took them except that they have been floating around bulletin boards in China for at least a couple of years.

Every year the Wharton and Law students put on a charity "fight night" for volunteer student boxers.  It's one of the best attended charity events of the year and gives students a chance to get in shape, learn to box, or just be rowdy in support of their classmates.

Full albums (password required):

• Match 1
• Match 2
• Match 3
• Match 4
• Match 5

Mountains and a flowing glacier as seen from 35,000 feet. 

 Note that I've commented many of the photos so you can tell what's going on.

• Cusco
• Sacred Valley
• Inca Trail and Machu Picchu
• Puno and Lake Titicaca

Inspired by this 1.5 gigapixel image I tried to play around with some stitched panoramas on my trip to Peru.  You can click on the image to download the large (11 megabyte, 45 megapixel) file.

 Taken near the Temple of the Condor.

I'm back in one piece despite the airline's best attempts to delay me (32 hour trip home).  I will try to put up some comments on the trip and more photos as time permits. 

Woman posing for a photo in front of the incredible Inca masonry at Sacsaywaman (aka Sacsayhuaman).  Rocks weighing 120+ tons were quarried 2km away and worked into irregular shapes with only a few millimeters of tolerance at each joint.  The resulting stonework requires no mortar and fits snugly together to survive even powerful earthquakes.

See EXIF and GPS data plus an aerial view 

Today we had fantastic weather for walking around and taking a few photos:

 
Boathouses on the Schuylkill river

Crane detail

Looking back at city hall from the "Rocky steps" (in front of the Art Museum)

The art museum

Looking back at city hall.  The Comcast tower is under construction but they're up to about 50 floors so you can see the cranes behind the top of the Bell tower.

Monument with scenic background of power lines and Wawa billboard.

Skyline detail. Our apartment is one of the highrises lost in the middle.

Walking home last night I stopped to take this picure of the Comcast Tower (under construction, with cranes) and the Bell Tower….

..and dropped my 50mm/1.8 lens onto the pavement trying to change lenses one handed in the rain.  The lens glass is fine but the focusing gears grind now, making it pretty worthless for normal use.   However it's possible to use it as a fixed-focus macro lens by flipping the lens around so that the objective element faces the sensor.

 All I did is cut a hole through the lens cap and another hole through the body cap (which I've never used anyway) and superglue them together.  The result:

Since Canon EF lenses set the aperture using an electronic signal from the body, if you want to shoot stopped down you have to put the lens on the body, set the aperture, hit the DOF Preview button, and then remove the lens while holding DOF Preview.  Since DOF is so shallow at macro distances shooting wide open is pretty difficult.  

Here's a shot of a quarter with my "new" lens at f/4.5.

Above is the full frame, below is a 100% crop of the wheels on the right hand side.  It's a little blurry as I should have used a faster shutter speeed (or, heaven forbid, a tripod).

1985 in Winona; David D., Michael J., and Granddad.

Old slides are a lot more fun to work with than old negatives; the negatives have a more grain and color problems to begin with and tend to accumulate a lot more scratches on the film surface.

Even though it’s not travel writing per se this was the article I enjoyed most about Argentina: Argentina On Two Steaks A Day

I’ll echo everything in the article except that our steaks were pretty moderate in size. The best meal we had was on the first day when we stumbled into a no-name restuarant across from the Teatro Colón and got two 10oz sirloins, fantastic steak fries, drinks, etc. for $9 total.

Below the fold: Non-vegetarian-friendly photo of meat grilling al asador.

(more…)

Taken with a pocket camera (SD450).

Immediately outside the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi. A few months after we visited the mosque was bombed in an act of terrorism.

I’m surprised at how well “old” photos have survived. The quality of the film emulsion initially, the quality of the optics, and the lack of degradation over time often give a better photo than a cheap modern camera. This photo is my dad in December 1959; a scan of a color slide that’s almost fifty years old.

One of the Red Dao that led us around Ta Phin when we visited. The women in this tribe wear distinctive red headgear – this is the more conservative (utilitarian?) style.

Fatehpur Sikri is a World Heritage site near the Taj Mahal and Agra. More photos are in the last half of this album.

with Philadelphia City Hall in the background.