Category Archives: Places

Thoughts and photos from various places in the world.

Places

Las Vegas: A Night On The Strip

A video from our recent trip to Las Vegas. It’s a tour of the Las Vegas Strip at night, featuring most of the famous hotels and casinos, plus impromptu shows by the dancing fountains at the Belaggio and the volcano at the Mirage.

There’s an upcoming video dedicated to Bellagio’s dancing fountains, where huge artesian fountains spit water into the air from hundreds of jets, all of it synchronized to music. I thought they were amazing. I also have a day tour of the Strip, which is an interesting contrast to all of the lights and colors you see at night, and I’ll edit that in the near future.

The video you see here is a 3-day editing effort. It takes a bit to assemble all the sequences, and there’s a fair bit of software motion-stabilization to steady the shots.

Enjoy!

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Places

At home in FL

This is a short video recorded in the yard of our home in South Florida, in December 2008. It features flora and fauna typical of our sub-tropical climate, such as palm and pine trees, ficus, lizards, and various flowers. I recorded these sequences with a (then) new digital camera, the Kodak EasyShare Z1015 IS, a 10 megapixel, 15x optical zoom camera that also takes 720p HD videos.

Given my fairly positive experience with the Kodak EasyShare v610 camera, I thought the Z1015 IS would be a good step up. It would have been, except for certain flaws which made me return it, such as its unacceptably soft and grainy images at 12-15x zoom, and heavy banding and compression artifacts visible on a lot of the HD video clips I shot with it.

Perhaps I’ll post a fuller review of the Z1015 at some point. It would still be relevant, even though it’s been almost 1½ years since I tested it, because Kodak still lists it on their website, and the price is only $20 below its original $299 tag.

The video was intended to be a test of the camera’s capabilities. The only editing/manipulation I did was to image-stabilize some of the clips in iMovie. The camera’s image stabilization work alright for photos at long focal lengths, but it has a difficult time keeping up when video is being recorded at 7-15x zoom. The audio is unchanged, so you’ll get a good sense of the microphone’s ability, and the colors are what the camera gave me. It’s in HD, so watch it full screen to enjoy it.

Watch “At home in FL” on blip.tv | YouTube

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Places

Espresso at Pensiunea Stejarul

A few days ago, on Tuesday, we’d woken up early to drive to Cluj, and we were passing a place I’d often wanted to stop at, but never found the time. The place is called Pensiunea Stejarul, and they’re open 24/7. The setting for this restaurant is quite beautiful. It’s high up on the tallest hill outside the city of Tarnaveni, in the middle of an oak forest.

That day, we had the time. It was freezing outside, it was snowing slowly, we were driving slowly, and wanted to stop and take in the scenery for a bit. So we did. I had an espresso, and Ligia had a tea. My N95 refused to focus properly, and all the photos I got were rubbish. This was the best of the lot.

The espresso was almost great. Much better than this one, but not among the best I’ve ever had.

This is what the restaurant looks like from above, courtesy of Google Maps. And this is their exact location.

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Places

Espresso at Hotel As

The photo you see below doesn’t tell the whole story, but I like photographing espresso cups, what can I say…

It was a little past 6 o’clock in the morning this past Thursday, we’d been driving all night, it was snowing and freezing outside, there was black ice on the road, and we needed some warm breakfast. We stopped at a hotel/restaurant called Hotel As, on E60, between the villages of Tureni and Copaceni, north of Turda, in Transilvania, Romania.

We had scrambled eggs, I had the espresso, Ligia had a tea, and we walked around the restaurant looking at the beautiful paintings they had on the walls, depicting quaint medieval streets and buildings. Unfortunately the waiter couldn’t tell me who the artist was, and didn’t have any contact information for him/her. We wanted to buy one of the paintings.

I suppose I need to rate the espresso: it was barely decent — nothing special, but at least it had a modicum of caffeine to keep me awake. Got a screenshot of the hotel from Google Maps below, and this is their exact location. We’ll probably stop there again at some point in the future — if for no other reason than to look at the paintings once more.

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Places

A lakeshore in winter

On the rocky shore of a fishing lake during a winter snowfall. In countryside of Transilvania, Romania, in the lake and hill region located somewhere between the cities of Ludus and Apahida, in the county of Cluj.

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