We’ve been rooted in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for a couple weeks now and all I can say is, “Boy is it nice to stay in one place!”

When I think back to when we left Juneau last July, it seems like we’ve been traveling forever, but when I think about all the things we still want to see and do, it feels like we’ve barely begun.  At any rate, we’ve been moving from hostel to hostel since mid-November and it was high time we got ourselves some R&R.

We had some good reasons for picking Buenos Aires for a prolonged stay.  Once we decided to continent-hop towards Africa, instead of Australia, it seemed like the most likely place to find cheap tickets.  Also, Anna, Oksana’s friend who joined us in Santiago for a couple weeks of travel, was flying home from Ezeiza, so we had to stop there.  Furthermore, back in 2007, we met a nice couple from the city while learning how to dive in Australia; it would be nice to see them again.  And finally, another couple we met on our recent tour of the Salar de Uyuni said to look them up when we got here.

We’ve only seen our friends, Cristian and Giselle, a couple times since we’ve been here, but they’ve already proven an invaluable help.  We stopped by their office on our first day in the city and mentioned our intent to stay for a month.  After politely declining their offer to stay with them in their house – rent-free! – they put us in contact with a property manager (Teresa, who spoke perfect English.)  We met with her the next day and within an hour or so, we’d signed a month-long contract on a fantastic apartment!

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Purchase a Print

Ever since catching up on naming all my digital images, I’ve been meaning to go back through them and set aside the photos I especially like.  The first choice was an easy one because Oksana made it a part of a montage of honeymoon pictures that hang on our bedroom wall.  Every night I’m reminded that I should quit procrastinating…

One day on our honeymoon in St. Thomas, Oksana and I went on a day-long sailing excursion.  It was a beautiful day (as most days in the Caribbean are) and we passed the time lounging on the deck, sipping frozen rum drinks, and snorkeling at various spots along the coast of St. Martin.  We were under sail at one point, moving fairly fast, when we passed this skiff anchored in the deep, clear water.  I didn’t have time to frame my shot, but I managed to take two quick pictures as we sailed by.  Looking at them later, I decided that neither was well composed.  The first framed the boat and its shadow, but it was the second that caught the shoreline and a piece of the sky.

After looking at both pictures, I decided to see what Autostitch would do with them.  Turns out, nothing at all.  Understandably, It didn’t see them as photos in a panorama.  I decided to trick the software by cropping out just the upper portions of the photos, rotating them both 90 degrees, and trying again.  That gave me a tiny “panorama” of just the shore and sky.  I took that into Photoshop and laid it over the first photo.  A little bit of soft-edged eraser here, some cloning of the sky there, and voila; a new composite photo with only the best parts remaining!

(I think the horizon still looks off, sloping down a bit to the left as it does.  I tried rotating it back to the horizontal, but for some reason that looked even less correct.  Maybe it’s a curved-peninsula-perspective thing.)

Canon Powershot s30
Date: 4 September 2002
Focal Length: 7.1mm
Shutter: 1/1000 second
Aperture: F/2.8
Photoshop: Merging of two photos, Cloning sky (upper left), Minor color correction

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