blog.rightreading.com

Jeff Barry has completed an interesting project of culling his blog archives to produce a free e-book, called Buenos Aires, City of Faded Elegance. He explains:
Whenever I come across a new blog I read the latest postings and, if I like those, I add the site to my news reader. I always intend to go [...]

These ladies were having a great time at the Getty Center. They thought it was a hoot that I wanted to take their picture.
More L.A. photos: At Buried Mirror I’ve posted a couple of pictures of the wonderfully kitsch facade of the Mayan Theater.

I’m having some trouble getting my Maya materials online because there are so many of them, and there’s just so little time. So, we’ll do this one building at a time. This is “El Caracol” (”the snail,” so called in Spanish for its winding internal staircase), which is called “The Observatory” in English.
It’s not hard [...]

Over at Frisco Vista I’ve posted a photo of a windmill in Golden Gate Park and, for comparison, one in Bruges, Belgium.
Well, I guess I’m on a windmill kick. (After all Cervantes and I share a birthday . . . the day, not the year, smart ass!) So here’s a picture of the inside of [...]

Much of the Maya Riviera, stretching from Cancun south beyond Playa del Carmen, is a bit of a horror show, full of giant resorts and traffic jams, and crawling with loud, lobster-red gringos. Puerto Morelos (“la joya del Caribe” — the jewel of the Caribbean), however, though just 25 kilometers or so south of Cancun, [...]

I’m just back from a trip to el mundo Maya.
This photo (click the photo — or here — for a larger view, via Flickr) was taken in very dark conditions at Cenote X’Keken near Valladolid in the Yucatan. Travelers to the Yucatan know that cenotes are sinkholes formed by water erosion through acidification of the [...]

For this image from my Bruges in December 2006 photoset (click image for larger view) I lightened and brought out detail in the dark areas using the following workflow:
1. duplicate background layer
2. desaturate new layer
3. invert desaturated layer
4. gausian blur new layer (a lot)
5. change blend mode to soft light
6. adjust levels, curves, hue/saturation
This is [...]

Coming back from Belgium my flight to Heathrow was cancelled because of freezing killer fog. By hiking to the Bruges train station at 3:00 am, I was able to get to Brussels in time to catch a Eurostar train to London. But the Eurostar train was also delayed, and so were all the local London [...]

I’ve added a bunch more photos to my flickr set of pictures of Bruges in December.
I noticed that Photoshop’s “save for web” plug-in stupidly strips out the images’ exif (camera settings) data. I think that information should always be available, so I’ve done regular manual saves on this batch. Later on I’ll replace the earlier [...]

Morning Reflections
This photo is part of a set from my trip to Bruges. Since I’m here on business I’ve only had a couple of hours to walk around. I might have some time later this week to stroll around some more, and if so I will add to this set, which can be found here:
Photos [...]

I have a feeling I’m not going to get a lot of sympathy with this, but I have to be in Bruges in Belgium next week — far from family and holiday preparations — on a press check. I’m printing a book about the art of the Mewar kingdom of Rajasthan with Die Keure there. [...]

What’s making the sea lions cranky? Frisco Vista, a new site devoted to San Francisco travel (what they’re building is so new they’re still working on the foundation) is asking that question.

This handsome fellow is an Indian Mongoose (called manakuke in Hawaiian). Seventy-two mongooses were introduced into Hawaii in 1872 in an effort to control rats that had arrived in the islands as a side effect of the sugar cane industry. The rats, like many newcomers to the islands, found Hawaii to their liking, and they [...]

north shore, Oahu

at Kailua Beach

A work trip brings rightreading to Waikiki this week, so posting will be light.
After a short time here I observed that Waikiki is evidently Hawaiian for “place of pink skin.” Weather on arrival was pushing 90, with 80 percent humidity — so humid even the locals were complaining. But the haole to a man (and [...]