Thoughts and photos from various places in the world.
There’s a majestic beauty in these mountains that’s much more appreciated if you walk on them, rather than drive through on the Transfagarasan or the Transalpina. Their scale is easily underestimated from the car, until you step outside and size yourself next to a peak that seemed small just a minute ago, or you start climbing it and quickly run out of breath. Physical fitness aside, the overwhelming feeling when you’ve immersed yourself in their environment is one of awe and respect.
We recently visited Lake Vidraru, located in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, alongside the famed Transfagarasan Road. We hiked, drove off-road, went boating, visited nearby landmarks, so look for more photos in future posts, but in this post, I want to show you two time-lapse videos that I made using photographs taken during the trip. These are my first time-lapse videos, so it is a special occasion for me. I hope you enjoy them!
The first is a record of our boating trip on Lake Vidraru. It’s made up of 628 individual photographs, which I obtained by setting up my camera and tripod up on the bow of the boat, securing it to the mast with a rope and setting my remote to take photos every 10 seconds. It was a bit tricky to get the photos because the boat’s engine made the tripod vibrate quite a lot, plus I didn’t have a straight horizon line, because of the boat’s yawing. It required a bit of post-processing work but I think it came out alright.
The soundtrack is “Sonata No. 5 in E minor – IV Allegro” by Vivaldi, interpreted by Keith Lewis on the cello and Carol Holt on the harpsichord. It is public domain, available from MusOpen.
The second video came out much better, mainly because I had a steady surface on which my tripod could sit (that’s really key in time-lapse photography). It shows landscapes of Lake Vidraru, recorded over the course of three days from the vantage point of the Valea cu Pesti Hotel, which overlooks it. It’s made up of 1,920 individual photographs, taken at 5, 10, 20 and 30 second intervals.
The soundtrack is “Piano Concerto No. 3, Op 37, 1st Mvt” by Beethoven, interpreted by the Davis High School Symphony Orchestra. It is also public domain, available from MusOpen.
As we near the autumn of 2012, our thoughts turn inward. We think of colder times ahead and we just want to curl up with a book and a nice cup of tea — or look at memories from bygone years, like photos from the autumn of 2005, taken seven years ago. Most of them were taken in Grosvenor Park, a nice, quiet community in Maryland where we were living at the time. You’ll see Ligia in a few of the photos, sitting quietly at the edge of a pond where ducks were getting ready for their annual migration.
Who says we can only look at spring photographs in the spring? On my site, in this little virtual world I’ve created, spring comes whenever I want it, and now’s a perfect time for it. Here’s a set of photos of spring flowers, with a heavy concentration of daffodils. And if you’d like to see even more such gorgeous photos, see this post. Enjoy!
In the autumn of 2006, I bought a new camera, a Panasonic DMC-FZ20 with a Leica lens, and for the first time in a long time, I was really happy with my pictures. I could use the camera whichever way I liked. The in-camera JPG conversion worked wonderfully and the photos came out looking great. These photos you see here are among the first few hundred I took with that camera. I hope you’ll like them as much as I do.
Now, because there are a lot of them, I’ll only post a few of them large and post the rest as thumbnails. When you click on a thumbnail below, the website will open it up large, in a lightbox, and even let you scroll between them, so enjoy!
Raoul Pop 