Jay Lee – Page 34 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Barcelona – Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya

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Since it is raining and we have also mastered the metro, we decided to spend the day at the museum looking at art. Not a bad choice at all. Unfortunately, I find photographs from inside a museum to be kind of boring. I love seeing the art and browsing the gallery and I do take photos, but the results always seem kinda bleh. Here are a few that I like from the day. You’ll note that two of them are not actually pictures of the art, but are of the historic building housing the art. And one is of the intrepid William The Sheep.

Barcelona – Day 2

As the weather sites have all been saying for the last few weeks, today is a day of heavy rain. I’d hoped the forecast would change as we got closer to arrival, but it did not.

Fortunately, we packed foul weather gear and have been moving about. The first stop today was La Boqueria for some breakfast at The Bar Central Cafe and then to have a look around and take some photos.

It is a unique market with fresh produce, meat and seafood. Some of the seafood is so fresh it tries to crawl, slither or otherwise wriggle out of the display.

Arrival – Barcelona

We made it to Barcelona without a hitch. The only real bump in the road was that we arrived to the hotel around 11:00 am Barcelona time and the room wasn’t ready for us to check in yet. After a long overseas flight it is tough to cool your heals waiting to get into your room. They finally gave it to us around 1:30. We quickly unpacked a few things and took a 2 hour nap.

One we woke up we were pretty hungry so we walked across the street to the El Corte Ingles and bought some groceries.

After we had eaten something we felt much better and rode the metro over to see the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc

We ran out of steam pretty quick and headed back to the hotel. As we were walking Cynthia suggested we go have a look at Casa Batlo which is not to far away. We walked over and snapped some shots, but I am not overly pleased with what I got so may plan to shoot some more later.

Of course William The Sheep is tagging along for the journey

Time to get some sleep and get ready for tomorrow. Rain is forecast, but we’re prepared!

Bon Voyage!

And so it begins! Barcelona and Valencia, here we come!

Extraterrestrial Abduction Day

AHHHH!

Our semi-annual holiday card

Las Fallas 2011

We’re going back to Las Fallas!

*UPDATE* We’ve returned from Las Fallas. All of my pics can be seen by clicking here!

Of all the places in the world Cynthia and I have traveled to, no place has captured our imagination in quite the same way as Valencia, Spain. And this is due to the annual Las Fallas celebration held there each year. The festival kicks off in late February, but the most important portion takes place from March 15th to the 19th. This is the period where the Fallas-Sculptures are setup all over the city. Hundreds of them. And the the Fallas-Sculptures are what this festival is really all about.

Way back in the olden days (the middle ages), the Fallas-Sculptures were just piles old junk that were being moved out of the workshops after the winter and burned. Over the years people began dressing the junk in old clothes, painting faces on it and creating something satirical out of the piles of debris.

What they have evolved into is something quite spectacular

Fallas

Each neighborhood of the city has an organized group of people, the Casal faller, that works all year long holding fundraising parties and dinners, usually featuring the famous speciality paella. A casal faller is also known as a comissió fallera.

These sculptures are magnificent and they are everywhere around the city of Valencia. Some of them reach as high as 6 or more stories in height and can be quite expensive to build. The larger Fallas can cost upwards of 600.000€ (over 3/4 of a million dollars), all paid by the members of the Falla-Community, donations only.

During the course of the festival the Fallas are just on display, but at the end of the festival they are ceremonially burned to the ground.

Crema

If you can imagine it, millions of people roaming the streets and hundreds of Fallas burning. The whole city is covered in smoke and fire. It is unbelievable.

And that is not all there is to Las Fallas, either. The festival itself is a Valencian traditional celebration in praise of Saint Joseph. So that means there’s religious overtones to the entire event.

During 2 days of the festival there is what is called the Ofrenda de Flores a la Virgen de los Desamparados (flower offering to our Lady of the Forsaken) where thousands of women dressed in traditional garb parade into the city on 4 major parade routes and carrying carnations which they then hand off to men who use them to build the dress of a large statue of the Virgin Mary.

And to answer the question I always get asked, NO, she is not burned.

The last major component of Las Fallas is the fireworks. All day long from dawn to the wee hours of the morning there are explosions. Incidental fireworks going off all day long. You can buy them at the local store and detonate them at will…just about anywhere you want.

There are two primary fireworks displays that occur each day.

The first is a mid-day event known as the Mascleta (sound fireworks). This is a mid-day detonation that takes place at 2 pm each day and is designed not so much to be seen, but to be heard. 10’s of thousands of people crowd the main square to get as close as they can to the detonation site and for 20 minutes fireworks are detonated. Cynthia and I got in close once and during the event you cannot hear your own voice even if you scream at the top of you lungs.

The second is an evening display. Well, I say evening. It starts about 1:00 am and is the most spectacular display i have ever seen. It lasts for about 30 minutes and then it’s over for the night. Everyone heads back to find food or get some sleep before things kick off again around 8:00 am

All in all, this is a very unique festival. And we enjoyed it so much in 2009 that we decided to go back this year. We’re also taking a side trip to Barcelona, another of our favorite destinations. Look for updates and pictures here. If you want to see photos and travelog of the last trip to Las Fallas, you can find it here. Several pages of pics and commentary over the course of our experience.

Lens Lust

I popped in to my local ~~crack~~ camera dealer just to have a look around. I wasn’t really shopping all that hard. I mean, there are things I am keeping an eye out for, but mostly I like to browse and just be in and amongst the camera equipment and around other photographers. Almost always I leave empty handed. Which is good. I don’t have the budget to spend for every single piece of gear I might want.

While I was there I looked in the case where they keep the used Sony/Minolta gear. Typically, there is usually not much there. Of course there’s always plenty of second hand Nikon and Canon gear, but when it comes to high end of the Sony/Minolta equipment it is usually slim pickin’s.

But there in case was the legendary Sony 70-400mm G Lens. And not only that, it was being sold for a price that was dramatically lower than you can buy it new and significantly lower than what I’ve seen it go for used, when/if they even show up.

Initially, I dismissed it. I don’t tend to shoot in this focal range. I knew it was a good deal, I just couldn’t justify it for my type of shooting. I already had the Sony 70-300 G and the Tamron 70-200 f/2.8 so really, what’s the point? So I left, empty handed.

As I was driving around, running some errands, I kept thinking about that lens. I had read the reviews and seen all the praise. The sony 70-400 G is not just a good lens, it is (by all accounts) one of the best lenses ever made in its class. As I mulled it over more and more I decided that I should buy the lens and, if nothing else, resell if for a profit or use it as trading fodder for another lens via the photography forums I belong to. With this brilliant justification in mind I made my way back to the camera store and bought the lens. They even reduced the price a little more so it was an even better deal.

Once I had it in hand and started playing with it I started falling in love. For a lens of that range it is surprisingly light. It’s beast, but it’s a manageable beast. And the image quality has a “WOW” factor that can only be described by using sample shots. Unlike so many long zoom lenses, the 70-400 G is sharp from 70mm all the way out to 400mm. It is simply wonderful.

These are from my first workout with the lens at The Houston Zoo. All shot using this lens attached to my A850. The entire gallery can be seen by clicking here. If you chase the links back to their respective Flickr pages you can view EXIF info and look at the full sized image files which REALLY give you a sense of the sharpness and quality.

Needless to say, I’m keeping the lens. I’ve been selling some of my unused glass on Ebay to recoup the expense.

Diorarium

When I picked Cynthia up from work on Monday she was carrying an empty 40oz plastic pretzel jar. I asked her what it was for and she proudly announced that she was going to make a terrarium out of it.

As we drove home we talked about the project and I suggested getting a lizard to put in the terrarium. She suggested a frog. We both quickly recognized that this was a recipe for disaster. I then suggested a fake plastic lizard or frog. Cynthia didn’t really like that idea so much and as the conversation unfolded she came up with the idea of staging a diorama of an alien spaceship abducting someone in the woods. I countered that maybe it should be a diorama of an alien spaceship abducting a cow.

Cynthia liked this idea. I said we could call it a “diorarium” (pronounced die-a-rare-ee-um) to which Cynthia immediately said “no” due to the unpleasantness of how the word sounded.

I told her I had a perfect UFO in the form of a die cast model of the Jupiter II from the original Lost In Space TV series. I also suggested we could probably find some plastic cows at the toy store.

As the plan unfolded we I came up with the idea that we could go to the model shop where I was sure we could find some N Scale cows used for scenery in model railroading. They ended up having the PERFECT cows.

Then it was just a matter of getting the plants, the soil, activated carbon and gravel to build the terrarium part of the diorarium (by day two Cynthia embraced this as the name of what we were creating).

With all the parts assembled we had to figure out how to suspend the spaceship and the cow being abducted. I went to the hardware store and purchased some monofilament fishing line which ended up being perfect.

If it works as it is supposed to we should not have to open it or water it again, or at least for a very long time.

Here is the completed project. As it turns out, photographing a fake UFO abducting a fake cow inside a plastic jar presents many of the same challenges as photographing the real thing. If the real thing actually exists. Which it probably does. (shhhh!)