Wild duck

The wildlife of Penn State... I want one please!

Ah centauri

Spotted at Tuileries Garden

Island

Appropriate picture for the song I was listening to, today...

Outdoors hagiography

Q: What's a guy doing with spray paint outside a church?
A: Hagiograffiti.

This one was spotted outside St Michaels golden domed monastery in Kiev. Or close to it...

traffic lights: Berlin

Our trip across the roads brings us back to Europe. This time in Germany, we saw the green Ampelmann in Berlin. According to the wikipedia entry, this figure starred in the traffic lights in East Germany, but I am very sure that I have seen this figure also in Heidelberg. If any of our german friends has some clue about this, I would love to hear it!

traffic lights: State college

Day 2, in Pennsylvania. Even though the green traffic light is the legendary little person crossing the road, the red traffic light is different.

Two things come to mind:

Halt!! Put the cot down slowly! (from an old greek commercial...)

and which was that movie where the famous phrase was heard: "talk to the hand" ?

Tomorrow, back in Europe.

traffic lights: Paris

I am going to take you a tour around the world and see the habits of pedestrians crossing the road.

Let's start from Paris. When the traffic light is red, you have to stand with your feet shoulder width apart and hands on the hips. Annoyed face is optional. When it is time to cross the road, you have to proceed very carefully, almost stepping on your toes! It reminds me a bit of 'the pink panther' :D

...or as the locals suggested, cross the road no matter if the light is green or red! Which is quite similar to our habits in Greece. Indeed, Paris felt like home ;)

Leaning tower

For sure you all know the leaning tower of Pisa, but what about the leaning tower of Bologna?

I was fortunate to visit Bologna last September. It is a very beautiful well preserved medieval city that has the oldest University in Europe. During the Roman times, several towers were erected for defence purposes and today only a few remain.

But what is it with the italian towers and they all lean?

RAW fun

I have always been a fun of digital post processing of photographs. After some googling I came across the program Darktable which processes RAW images and it is available for all platforms!

It is soooo cool! Take a look at the example here. On the left is the RAW image after some fiddling. On the right is the jpeg directly out of the camera. Of course it takes a lot of effort to process all of the pictures you take every time but I think it is worth it. You can save a picture that had a nice theme, but the settings went bad.

This picture is from the last weekend of this years' Octoberfest.

p.s. I have continuous numbering on the images on my camera, and about a month ago I reached 9999 pictures and the numbering started over. That is about ~650 pictures per month since I got the camera!

Day or Night

Very creative garage door spotted in Paris, but I am not sure what is the message that comes across. If I am reading this correctly, parking in front of this door is not allowed for French people day or night, for Germans only during the night and for Greeks during the day. I cannot find anything for English people though. ;)

p.s. As always, click on the image to enlarge it!

Cool and fresh

Having a long layover? No problem! You have the chance to entertain yourself with a brand new camera!
Spotted: Philadelphia airport, not surprising right? ;)

p.s. I was severely tempted...