I’ve got good news and bad news about Egypt.  Which do you want first?  How ‘bout the bad.

Oksana and I have visited somewhere between 25 and 30 countries so far and it’s safe to say that Egypt is our least favorite so far.  Why the hate?  Because of the hassle.

Our guidebook warned us, a tourist in Tanzania warned us, friends on Twitter warned us, even the guy behind the counter at our hostel in Cairo warned us, but I still couldn’t believe it would be as bad as they said.  It was.  Actually, it was worse.

Listen to me.  If you go to Egypt, you will be hassled, hounded, yelled at, and argued with.  You will be followed, lied to, cheated, and taken advantage of.  The people in Egypt will not leave you alone.  They will do everything in their power to separate you from your money.

There is no escape from it.  At the pyramids of Giza, camel riders will follow you around, pestering you with questions constructed from the seven words of English they’ve memorized:  “You want ride? Camel ride? Hello? Camel ride. Twenty dollars.  Hello? You want camel ride?”

At the temples, Bedouins will step in front of you to get your attention, point out a hieroglyph on the wall, lie about what it represents (“Look! Cleopatra!”), and then hold out their hand for money.

In the Valley of the Kings, “helpful” people standing at the entrance to the tombs will hand you a half-dead flashlight as you enter and then demand money for it when you try to leave, even though you never used it because the whole tomb was lit with florescent lights.

If you’re not a dark-skinned Arab wearing a robe or a turban, you’re a mark.  Egyptians will swarm around you like a cloud of mosquitoes, buzzing in your ears, eventually angering the most patient tourist.

We tried everything we could think of to avoid them; nothing worked.  Sometimes we lost our temper. I’m ashamed to admit that we even swore at a few.  They swore right back.  They know all the worst words, in every language, because they’ve heard them all before from travelers just like us.

We were told again and again that the best thing we could do was ignore them.  Don’t make eye contact, show them your back.  We tried.  It was as simple as ignoring that cloud of mosquitoes and just as effective.
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I spent quite a bit of time at the recent NASA Tweetup looking through my camera’s viewfinder.  Although I didn’t come away with any decent photos of the launch itself (I focused on the video this time, instead), I figured this week’s photo would still come from last weekend.

Then I found myself playing with Oksana’s new iPad, installing the Dropbox app.  I tapped into my account and started to play with what could and couldn’t open on the tablet.  That’s when I came across a folder full of Ecuador photos and realized that, even though I hadn’t taken my DSLR along on the trip, I still managed to come away with some decent shots.

This is Baños.  I love this little town tucked in the middle of the mountains.  There are trails everywhere up the steep hillsides and it only takes around 40 minutes to hike to the top (even if you do have to huff and puff through the altitude).

On one such hike, we found ourselves at the surprisingly popular Café del Cielo.  It was one of the few places we encountered in Baños that had unrestricted wi-fi, plus the packed house was a good indication that the food wasn’t bad, either.  They were too busy to even put us on the waiting list, though, so we resolved to come back later.

Later turned out to be New Year’s Eve.  We wanted to be reunited with the rest of the group before midnight, so hiking up and down the trail in the dark wasn’t an option.  We took an expensive cab ride up the meandering roads behind the mountain instead and, what with all the costumed kids stopping us for New Year’s cash donations, it probably took just as long to get there.  Our driver, knowing that we were at his mercy, arranged for an even higher fare for a scheduled ride back down.

But it was all worth it.  Café del Cielo was practically deserted and the very friendly and attentive waiter put us right up against the plate glass windows.  While Robert, Ana, Alicia, and I enjoyed our small meals (everything cost $5 or less; fairly expensive for Baños) and fantastic fancy coffees, I leaned my wife’s point-and-shoot against the window and took many long-exposure pictures.  Oksana’s little Panasonic doesn’t give you any manual controls, but at least its Starlight preset allows you to dial in 15, 30, or 60 second exposures.  This shot was my favorite of the evening; no reflections in the glass and neither over- nor under-exposed.  Sort of the Goldilocks photo of the set.  You know, just right.

Panasonic DMC-TZ5
Date: 8:54pm, 26 June 2008
Focal Length: 29mm
Shutter: 30 seconds
Aperture: F/4.8
ISO: 100
Photoshop: Unaltered

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To celebrate the finale of Australian Idol in 2007, Sydney hosted a fireworks display over the Sydney Opera House.  Much of the story of how we came to see it is presented in Postcard Valet episode 8, but we never mentioned there how we took our photographs in it.

Oksana and I sort of knew there was going to be a fireworks display (even if we didn’t let on in the podcast), so we made sure to get set up beforehand.  What we didn’t know, was when the fireworks were going to go off.  The results were being broadcast live on TV, but it wasn’t as if anyone at Circular Quay had a television…

So we set up two cameras – one for video, one for stills.  The video camera was perched on a tiny tripod atop a piling.  The best we could do with our DSLR was to balance it a little lower down on a railing.  Unfortunately, there was a short stairway down to the water in front of us and other bystanders kept standing right in front of it.

We had the Opera House framed pretty well, but we had no idea how high up the fireworks would be so we just waited. And waited.

You can see in the podcast that when the fireworks finally went off, they were higher than we thought they’d be.  The camera was already set on manual with long exposures, so while I recomposed the shot with the video camera, Oksana simply tilted our still camera back and began taking successive 8 second exposures.  We had 10 files on the flash card by the end of the show, so I guess that means it was somewhere around 90 seconds long.  Seemed longer.

Some of those photos are overexposed, especially toward the end when they wrapped up the pyrotechnics display with a huge finale.  Others have too much smoke hanging in the air.  While this one might not be the very best of the bunch, it’s my favorite.

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 25 November 2007; 9:03pm
Focal Length: 28mm
Shutter: 8 seconds
Aperture: F/10
ISO: 200
Photoshop: Cropped and slightly rotated.

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My luck in photographing lightning seems to be improving.

While in Moscow, Oksana and I hooked up with Vika, an old friend of hers who used to be a fellow Russian exchange/international student in Juneau. She and her boyfriend, Vanya, took us out to a restaurant on the 22nd floor of a university building. As the sun set, all of Moscow was laid out before us.

Just before dinner arrived, at Vanya’s insistence, I attempted to capture a lightning strike from a fast-approaching thunderstorm. Only three shots into my attempt, Oksana called me back to the table; dinner had been served. “Last one,” I called, just before a bolt shot down.

During dinner, the storm built in intensity. As soon as I finished my meal, I excused myself for another attempt. The very next photo, the one pictured above with two almost-simultaneous strikes, was the result. Seconds later, the wind and rain chased us inside.

By the time we settled the check and made it downstairs, a good-sized pond had formed in the building’s courtyard and doorway. Vanya and Andrey bravely sacrificed their aridity (but not their shoes) in a mad dash out to the car for the umbrellas stashed within.

Canon Digital Rebel XT
Date: 15 July 2006
Focal Length: 18mm
Shutter: 25 seconds
Aperture: F/20
Photoshop: Minor color correction, minor cropping
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I was tired last night. Too many consecutive nights without enough sleep, I guess, and I was quite content to go to sleep around 9pm. Before heading to bed, though, I took a peek outside to see if the evening’s forecast of thunderstorms had any merit.

At first glance, it didn’t look like it. The air was warm and while there were ominously dark clouds overhead, the air was still and Oksana and I were able to stay out on the porch in nothing more than a T-shirt and shorts. It was so uncharacteristically pleasant for a Juneau evening that, despite my desire for nothing more than an early bedtime, we stayed outside and watched the weather.

A huge black cloud was directly over us. We watched it churn its way north, over Spaulding Meadows before it began to break up. If I hadn’t looked out over Auke Bay to see another large mass of dark clouds forming, that would have probably been it – we would have been asleep by 9:30pm. But I thought that the conditions might be right for a third (a third!) thunderstorm this summer. And wouldn’t you know it, while we were waiting, we caught a few flashes of pink on the western horizon.
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