I have at last added a gallery of landscape photos from Ticino to the photography pages.

The selection of 16 photos was taken from a period spanning the last 6 years. They’re mostly digital: it will be interesting to see if anyone can spot those which aren’t, not that it matters in the slightest as far as I’m concerned.

dusk over Cristallina

The locations are pretty spread about, although Ritom-Piora / Lucomagno and Verzasca / Vallemaggia areas take the majority share. There’s only one winter shot that made the cut. It seems that winter photography isn’t my strongest point!

I’ve left out one of my favourite locations, Lavertezzo and the surrounding area in Val Verzasca, because that is going to be the subject of a future gallery.

Thanks, as ever, for visiting!

At last.

Somewhere around one year ago - possibly longer, I don’t remember - and shortly after being awarded “website of the month” by Outdoor Photography, I decided to take my photo galleries, and indeed my whole website, offline.

The website itself was getting old and creaky, and was becoming a real rat’s nest of patched together hand built code.  I wanted to replace it with something easier to maintain, more flexible, and based on something reasonably solid. This I finished a while ago.  But the other issue was the photographic content.

I used to host over 700 photos online, divided into about 10 galleries. Despite the fact that I got a lot of good feedback, this was clearly far too much. I felt that something was wrong, and some good advice from a friend convinced me I needed to cut down the quantity drastically, and focus on quality, and the message I want to send.

Unfortunately, whatever things I may be any good at, editing is not one of them.  The task of selecting a handful of photos to show from a collection of well over 15,000 was not easy. And it was made harder, when, early this year, I indulged myself in a high quality Quato display. Photos that I had discarded for being uninteresting or flawed suddenly popped into life on this new monitor, and I realised I was going to have to take another look at my archives.  I’ve recently completed reprocessing and evaluating just about all of my several thousand photos from Iceland, and the results of this exercise (started around March, finished a few weeks ago) are the subject of the first two of my new galleries.

The new thumbnails layout

Now that the technical stuff is completed, I can finally give my full attention to the fun part - the photography. I’ll be adding more galleries in the (relatively) near future, in particular panoramic format photos from Iceland and elsewhere, and at least one Ticino gallery.

I certainly want to avoid getting back into the quantity overload scenario, but I do want to try to show a representative selection. Probably I will inaugurate a “recent work” gallery soon, with more rapidly evolving content. I may also showcase some of my infra red photography, as well as black & white, since I seem to be doing more of that these days.

But for now, I’m just relieved that I’ve finally got something to show again.

NOTE: Although I try to test as much as possible on different web browsers, some bugs might lurk.  In particular I’ve noticed an intermittent and baffling bug in (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer (7 & 8, I cannot be bothered with 6).  Full size images sometimes display with a white band across them. Refreshing the page clears it up.  I’ll try to fix this, but I’m not going to hold back from going live because of bloody Microsoft.

the Internet Explorer bug. No website is complete without one.

Murphy has a lot to answer for. I finally got around to taking a mountain outing with only my Ricoh GR-D, in a pleasant valley in the vicinity of Les Diablerets, Canton Vaud, known, it seems, for its marmot population. This time I had the pleasure of the company of my better half, as well as our Romainian-Canadian friends from Ottawa.

At the highest point of the walk we stopped for a lazy lunch. Adrian wandered over to inspect a patch of snow (apparently they don’t have snow in Canada ?) and rushed back excitedly some time later saying he’d seen “at least 7” marmots.

Well, these marmots had unusually long horns and were the size of a very large sheep.  In fact they were a little known variant of marmot, valled “ibex”.

Well, bugger. Ibex are not that common. Relatively approachable ibex even less so. I’ve never managed to get so close without spooking them (about 100m). And I had a 28mm lens…

So, here, for your pleasure, a pair of alpine ibex at 28mm.

Naturally, had I dragged 5kg of image stabilised Olympus E-3 with f2.8-3.5 50-200mm lens up there, would we have met the ibex ? Of course not.

Today I decided to take a relatively short walk in an area I discovered last winter, and like quite a lot, Val Calneggia. Calneggia is a road and car free valley, reached by a steep but easy path from Foroglio in Val Bavona. Although I was very tempted, I decided not to “solo” the route up to Gradisc as I’d promised not to push my luck (after last week’s adventure) and the bridge above the Calneggia hamlet has been totally vapourised by snow or meltwater, meaning a minor but nevertheless not-to-be-attempted-alone scramble is required. And I’m lazy.

Val Calneggia from Calneggia

ANYWAY…

The sort-of justification for this jaunt was to see if my actually rather good Ricoh GRD could subsitute for the 20-odd kg of Olympus gear I dragged up to 2500m last week. So I made sure I had the pouch I use to carry all the GRD’s little bits and pieces with me. I took the Olympus anyway, thinking that I might get a few shots of the waterfall, which I did, or divert to Niva where I have a long-standing wish to revisit a location, which I didn’t.

the waterfall at Foroglio

Having spent half an hour on the waterfall, I went back to the car to switch over to intrepid mountain hiker mode, and swap the Ricoh for the Olympus. It was at this point I realised that I hadn’t actually packed the Ricoh.  So I jammed the Olympus with the 14-54mm lens in the now too small daypack I’d brought, having succesfully added cameras to the list of things my memory has decided not to bother with any more.

Oh well. Next time, maybe.

The end of film ? Well, not exactly, but it appears that Nikon has discontinued the Coolscan 5000 film scanner, leaving only the 9000. The 9000 scan scan up to 6x9 format, but has a nasty reputation for inserting horizontal, scratch-like lines in scans, a flaw which has never been fixed and probably never will be. The 9000 surely cannot now be long for this world, anyway.

My 8 year old Minolta Multi Scan Pro is still working well (touches wood) but if it ever decides to throw a cog, well, I’m screwed. The only quality film scanners on the market now, at least new, are the mind-numbling expensive Hassledblad/Imacon Flextights, starting at 10,000 (currency irrelevant). There are a few low end units around - Plustek, maybe Microtek, but that’s it. End of story for quality desktop scanning.

Flatbed scanners, even the top rated ones like the Epson V750, don’t deliver anything like the real resolution or dynamic range.

There must be a large enough market for a specialist manufacturer (Cosina, maybe ?) to produce a quality 6x9 film scanner at a price below $3000 - even by taking over Nikon’s production tools. Here’s hoping. And praying that the famous Minolta build quality lives on.