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Arty photo du jour…

It’s just fabulous here.

In May I was in Sydney, and had dinner at the revolving restaurant at the top of the Centrepoint tower. The food was not bad. The view was spectacular. I took a few photos, some of which were a bit blurry and most of which had some reflections from inside the restaurant, but with the help of Photoshop I managed to blend three roughish images together to get this. It’s reasonably high resolution, if you want to click it and see the other sizes on Flickr.

I’m occasionally snatching the odd moment to get to grips with my new copy of Photoshop CS3, and there are some lovely new features. One of them is the excellent ‘photomerge’ facility for merging and aligning photos, which, amongst other things, makes for very good panoramas.

So today I was playing with the largest photo I’ve created so far. It’s an evening view in North Island, New Zealand, and is a little over 25Mpixels, created from several raw images merged. I didn’t take much care over the originals – I just jumped out of the car and snapped away, hand-held, in pretty low light. Still, it was the set of photos I happened to have at hand, so here it is at about 1/20th of its full resolution:

And here is a slightly larger version which will probably still fit on your monitor.

But how to appreciate the full image? It looks very nice on my 24″ monitor with 1440×900 resolution, but even that only shows me a fraction of the full resolution. I think I need to find somewhere that will create large prints in unusual aspect ratios.

If you want to get more of a feeling for the original resolution, you can try a page including a Flash-based viewer generated directly from Photoshop’s ‘Zoomify’ feature. You can zoom in and out and drag the image around. This won’t show you the full original quality but you can get close. You can just see the sheep on the hills beyond the road, for example. But it’s pretty hard to see the borders where Photoshop merged the original 5 pictures together.

Fun stuff. Here is a full-res JPEG (3M) if you want to test out your JPEG viewer.

A photo from my recent travels.

My friend Hap sent me this fine picture from Dijon.

Looks like… well… my kind of place.

I foolishly got hooked on Katie Melua‘s excellent album Piece by Piece just before going away on my round-the-world trip. Foolishly, I say, because when I got to Beijing I couldn’t stop thinking about the song about nine million bicycles (extract here).

Still, it’s better than the time a few years ago when Rose and I watched The Sound of Music just before visiting Austria. It’s embarrassing to realise you’ve been wandering around a shop humming to yourself about edelweiss or lonely goatherds…

There’s a whole range of transport options in Beijing other than just bicycles, though. In fact, I can’t remember ever seeing such a variety of vehicles anywhere else. Here are a couple I quite liked:

At one point we even overtook a tree going down the highway at speed…

I think there was a vehicle under there somewhere.

I really stopped in Beijing to visit some long-lost friends, rather than because I’d ever had a great yearning to see the place. But I found myself enjoying it greatly. There are some downsides – the air pollution, combined with the dust that comes in off the desert, is pretty appalling, and best illustrated by this photo of my friends’ muddy windscreen:

This was the view after a rain shower had passed over the stationary car. The car had been nice and clean beforehand.

Another downside, for those not used to them, are the Chinese lavatory facilities. In some spots, the Tourist Board has started indicating their suitability for visitors with a star-rating system.

Even four stars doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a seat!

But, these things aside, it’s a fascinating place.

I visited the Temple of Heaven and admired the trees in the surrounding park.

I visited Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City, where it’s apparently good luck to rub the brass studs on the enormous doors.

Young volunteers within the walls tell you how privileged they feel to be able to work there, and how they hope you’ll come back, and bring your friends, and see the Olympics. Their upcoming hosting of the games is hugely important to China. Personally, I have minimal interest in the Olympics, and some mild objection to the fact that my taxes are going to fund London’s decision to embrace the huge financial loss which hosting them always entails for the country concerned. But here the symbolic importance is huge and all around the city you see evidence of how things are being prepared, built, tidied up, covered up, so that the city will look presentable for the foreign visitors and the TV cameras.

I think the high point for me (in more ways than one) was the Great Wall. I had expected to be impressed by the scale, but I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful. It was a bright, clear (and very hot) day, and we took a cable-car up to the wall, then walked along it as it snaked along the mountain ridges through the lush vegetation.

How dull it would have been if it had been straight and flat! That’s probably what the Romans would have done.

There was relief from the heat inside the towers.

And some opportunities to gather extra material for my collection of notices from around the world.

The food was superb, my friends James and Annabelle were great hosts, the prices were just unbelievable and the people were friendly.

Pity about the government.

And now I’m back in Cambridge, and it’s cold and rainy. Which, after the dust and mid-30s temperatures of Beijing, is actually rather nice.

Like many people, I imagine, the only mental image I had of Sydney was of the Opera House, and even that was flawed: it’s not white, you know, as I had always assumed. It’s actually a subtle beige colour. Here’s the obligatory photo – a night shot, just to avoid being too clichéd!

So I had no idea what to expect of the rest of the city, but I subconciously assumed that modern architecture would be the norm. And while it has a central business district much like many modern cities…

…I was really struck by the older buildings, from the grand to the humble, from early Victorian to late Art Deco.

I stayed at a delightful B&B dating from the 1870s:

And I was impressed with the public transport system, where a ‘day tripper’ ticket gave me access to an excellent rail network which whisked me to and from the centre, and a couple of long ferry trips, around the bay and up the river, all for about 6 quid. (A stark contrast to the tattered remains of a once-great railway system which greeted me when I got back to London. But that’s another story…)

I don’t want to post too many photos at a time, so I’ll spare you the leafy residential neighbourhoods, the amazing sandstone cliffs around Bondi Beach, the lighthouses and bridges…. All in all, I liked Sydney very much, and hope I get a chance to return before too long.

I liked this notice, seen on a platform of the (excellent) Sydney rail system this evening:

Actually, as one travels around the world, one often comes across interesting signs. I think one day I’ll publish a coffee-table book…

This padlocked box was on a street in a New Zealand town. Is the sign intended to fool very dim criminals, do you think?

And this one, inside the door of a loo cubicle, also set me wondering. I must confess, I’d never had the urge to do this before:

Once you’ve seen it, though, you start to wonder. What have I missed out on all these years? What is the attraction? Demonstrating your sure-footedness? Spying on your neighbour in the next cubicle? Pretending you’re in a French toilet instead of a Kiwi one?

Whatever the appeal, it’s obviously sufficiently tempting that they had to make and put up a special sign…