Status-Q

The evening sun caught these wind turbines on Friday, just as we were descending into Frankfurth-Hahn airport.

I know some people consider them a blot on the landscape, but I've always thought them rather majestic.

If you visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, the thing that strikes you is the scale. You start at Auschwitz I, just down the road, where you hear about the various horrors. And then you visit Birkenau, and you realise that most of what you've just seen and heard about was really experimentation - they were just getting the small-scale process right so it could be expanded to an industrial scale.

It's almost impossible to capture this in a photograph. Most of the original buildings were wooden and only their chimneys remain as evidence. Have a look at this close-up of the right hand side to get a feel for the size of just a portion of the site. I'd visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem before, but this is something completely different.

A tour of Auschwitz is not an easy experience. But it's something everybody should do if they get a chance.

I liked the lack of anything very rectilinear in this one! Rose is in the tower of the church in Krakow market square. This is what is looks like from the outside:

One of my first HDR experiments.

I was most honoured to make the acquaintance of Piotr Fuglewicz on my recent trip to Poland. Piotr is a very smart chap, with a long history in IT and particularly in the computational linguistics world. He's also a good dinner companion.

Anyway, today, out of the blue, he sent me a photo:

(click for a larger version)

What's intriguing about this is that I took it, but I had never seen it before. Piotr assembled this panorama from three of my Krakow photos, which I hadn't even taken with the idea they might be stitched together! He used an amazing bit of software called Autopano Pro - you don't even have to give it a hint as to what goes where. Quite superb.

The user interface is complex - the basics are reasonably straightforward but there's then an infinite amount of tweaking you can do - but I can see I'm going to have to find time to play with this. Photoshop CS3 has some good panorama stuff built in, but it looks as if Autopano is to panoramas what Photomatix is to HDR... a dedicated tool which goes just that bit further.

Spotted in Krakow last weekend.

Rose at Krakow castle. I'll post another picture or two over the next couple of days, but you can see more of Krakow here if you're feeling keen.

The road from Krakow to Auschwitz

Auschwitz I

Birkenau disembarkation point

A 'dormitory' at Auschwitz-Birkenau

Hap snapped this picture of Rose and me in Tonbridge Castle car park last weekend trying to find somewhere to stay for the night (using a combination of an OS map and a wifi connection to my phone).

I was successful in finding places, but not ones with any spare rooms at such short notice. At least, not before my phone's battery ran out. It was tired after a long day of being my SatNav.

Incidentally, Quentin's theory of technological linguistics says that a technology is truly pervasive when you no longer capitalise it. How would you write 'satnav'?

We had dinner in Ely tonight and walked around the cathedral afterwards in a wonderful, autumnal mist. I only had my little pocket camera with me, but got a nice photo or two by doing things like setting the timer and using Hap's hat as a tripod (which works better when he isn't wearing it, by the way).

A couple of others here.