Edinburgh, Scotland

Last weekend was my wife's birthday.  Living in Northern Ireland is great because you can decide at the drop of a hat to go to another country.  And it's actually fairly reasonably priced to get to many countries.  So, for my wife's birthday we took a ferry to Scotland.

The ferry took us to Cairnryan, at which point we hopped on a bus and took a three hour ride along the Scottish coastal road and then through the countryside.  We ended up in Edinburgh where we spent a day and a half.  All of my photos from the trip are from Edinburgh, and all of them are tilt-shifted with my homemade tilt-shift lens.  This is the first trip/country where the only lens I used for the entirety of the trip was one of my tilt-shifts. 

This castle, the Edinburgh Castle, is one of the first things you will see in Edinburgh.  It dominates the horizon from its location on top of Castle Rock.  

This building can be found facing the Princes Street Gardens.

Meandering around the gardens might result in sights similar to these.

This is Edinburgh's Free Church Of Scotland

This is the Scotsman Hotel...plus the hustle and bustle of Scottish life.

An overexposed Saint Giles' Cathedral

A nice place to have a bite to eat outside.

The Greyfriars Bobby's Bar.  An even nicer place to have a bite to eat (they have vegetarian haggis!).

This is where we went for dinner on our first night in Edinburgh.  We had heard of this place prior to our trip to Scotland and when we stumbled upon it, we just had to go.  Here's the story that made this place famous...straight from Wikipedia:

  "Bobby belonged to John Gray, who worked for the Edinburgh City Police as a night watchman, and the two were inseparable for approximately two years. On 8 February 1858, Gray died of tuberculosis. He was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard, the graveyard surrounding Greyfriars Kirk in the Old Town of Edinburgh. Bobby, who survived Gray by fourteen years, is said to have spent the rest of his life sitting on his master's grave." 


 I want a loyal dog.

A quaint Scottish street (the yellow building is the Museum of Edinburgh).

This seemed like an appropriate scene to tilt-shift.  A window washer washing away.

The extremely overdone, yet still necessary, shot of the old red telephone booths.

And last but not least, on our way up a mountain we were stopped in our tracks by a freak hail storm.  I was able to capture some of it on video using my tilt-shift lens, but by that point it was starting to let up.

...and that is Edinburgh, Scotland...tilt-shifted.

Bardonecchia, Italy And The Surrounding Alps

Bardonecchia is an Italian town surrounded by the Alps.  If it wasn't for the 2006 Winter Olympics, it's unlikely that many people outside of the snowboarding and skiing community would know that this beautiful place exists.  If it wasn't for the fantastic mountains surrounding the town, I can't imagine that the Olympics would have been held there in 2006.

A recent trip to the town and a hike up the mountains yielded a few good pictures.  The trip gave me a great opportunity to tilt-shift another part of the world. 

This is Bardonecchia, a cute little town at the base of a mountain...Tilt-Shifted

a closer version of the town

a couple tilt-shifted shots of the surrounding Alps

...the last photo reminds me of a backdrop for The Sound Of Music

a hike straight up one of the mountains resulted in this shot

another shot of the mountains...this one isn't tilt-shifted

another photograph that wasn't taken with my homemade tilt-shift lens.  That particular lens doesn't lend itself well to panoramas.  

...and the last photograph - a tilt-shifted shot of the Alps from a plane

And that, my friends, is Bardonecchia, Italy and the surrounding Alps.  I know there wasn't a lot of variety in the photography of this post, but fear not, the next post should more than make up for it.