Old russian lenses

A colleague did lend me 2 old Russian lenses that can fit on my camera through an adaptor. Those were USSR made copies of post WWII German lenses and they happen to work, and pretty well. I might post a few pics taken with these antiquities in the next few days, but it's always amazing to take pieces of engineering over 40 years old and have them working right away, without having to read a manual or fix anything, it just works. If computers could just be like that... well maybe I wouldn't have a job.

CoeXisT

Saturday I took Ashok to Akko to visit the city and buy a few of the CoeXisT T-shirts that some of you noticed on my photo gallery. They get a lot of success everywhere I wore them so I've been distributing quite a few :). For those that missed it:


We went around the city, enjoyed a nice lunch in the harbor on a sunny day:

We then stopped in a coffee shop I like, smoke narguila, drank Arabic coffee with cardamom and gossiped all afternoon. I couldn't do much more anyway my legs were so sour from restarting basket ball the previous day (OK, I was close to needing a wheelchair).

Blues concert

Last night Evgeni took a group of us to a small Russian pub downtown where a blues duo was set to perform. In the end 2 members of the assistance ended up joining our two bluesmen at various times during the night. The beer was good and the music even better, it had been a long time since last time I had that good of live music in a bar.

More pictures at the usual place.

Peace talks restarting ?

Almost 15 years later, and a coup in Gaza, it seems that serious peace talks are restarting, with more or less the same solutions. It failed last time so nobody had been really trying since, but as there is not really any other solution someone needed to restart it. Exchanging land, connecting Gaza and the West Bank, recognizing the refugee problem and doing something about it, and finally splitting the holy sites in Jerusalem, everything seems to be there, the problems always have been in the details. Haaretz article here.

More pics

Here we go, I posted a few pictures from my trip to France and in Portland on zenfolio. And Yes I am lazy and don't feel like typing lots of stuff so here comes a picture for your eyes:

Back

I just came back from Portland, OR. I developped a few pictures trying to stay awake to fight jetlag. Here is a proof that sometimes it doesn't rain there:

Flying to France

I'll spend the rest of this week in the French alps with my family, on my way to Portland OR for a week of work. See you.

Rays of light

This evening I went to have dinner on the beach with Ashok and Aravindh. We had a good plate of tabouleh and baba ganoush watching for a spectacular sunset.

Akko Soukh

Yesterday I went to visit Waffa and Octavio in Akko. while they were closing the shop I went around the soukh, camera in hand seeing if I could capture some of what I love in the old city. You can see a few samples on Zenfolio as usual. Here is one I quite liked:


As you can see I disturbed the owner of that small square :). Anyway Akko is owned by stray cats.

Beaufort

Yesterday I joined Omer and Amir and Tel Aviv for the night. The drive was longer than expected, I spent almost one hour stopped on the highway. It seems that two palestinians managed to infiltrate Israel from Gaza and the Police had set blockades on all roads and were filtering traffic all over Israel.

For once I wasn't driving too fast :/.

After chatting and grabbing beers we picked up a movie, under Omer recommendation we picked Beaufort: an Israeli war movie that got a silver bear in Berlin festival.

"Perched atop a mountain in southern Lebanon, the Beaufort Castle has passed from army to army for hundreds of years. In the year 2000, Liraz Liberti, a young Israeli commander, is in charge of defending the last outpost.
It has become his reason to live, filling him with power, fueling him with self-importance, driving him to allow perilous - and ultimately meaningless - operations... Bomb specialist Ziv loses his life when the bomb he is about to defuse explodes. 19-year-old Zitlawi dies in a missile attack. And Oshri, who can´t wait to see his girlfriend in New Jersey, is severely injured in a bombing that leaves the swaggering Liraz frozen with terror... This is their story not of war, but of retreat, a story of no enemy, but an amorphous entity that drops bombs from the skies."

I do recommand watching it, well at least not on a depressed day.

PS: the building where I took the Front 5 picture 2 weeks ago has been destroyed, It looked kind of out of place, but no more interresting grafitis guesses.

The 15th of Av

Thursday night the city of Haifa organized a special street party for the 15th of Av. They blocked all the traffic to the main Carmel street just above my place, put a small scene, loud music, and all the bars and restaurants opened stands on the street. Six of us spent the evening in the crowd, enjoying the crowd, the fun and a few drinks. Here is how it looked like (more pics here):


Dancing on the bus stop with kegs.


Concert scene

The next day Omer, Michelle and I joined a few Omer friends camping on the beaches of the Tiberias lake. No pictures for you, the weather was so hot that we ended up dipping in water all day and all night (felt great :).

Weekend in Tel Aviv

I spent this last weekend in the city that never sleeps and... well I didn't sleep much either :). Friday afternoon an excellent lunch in a good restaurant, party during the night, saturday night Tori Amos concert and in between long promenades in the nearby parks and sea front. Tori's concert was a fantastic performance and convinced me I should listen more to her :).

I took the camera along (it's becoming an habit) and some samples can be found at the usual place. I found this scene to be pretty amusing (probably not for non french though):


And if any of you can find what the following picture is refering to, I am quite curious. Google didn't give me any easy answer.


I assume it is a reference to фронт though, but why 5 ?

Montfort

This weekend I went back to Monfort (fortified mount in french), an old crusader castle in a quiet isolated valley of western Galil. There was hopefully a nice breeze and some clouds that helped us deal with the summer's heat. The place is still filled with serenity, and what once was a very important road to watch over remained isolated and unbuild for almost a millenium.

Weekend in Jordan

After a week trying to organize a trip to Petra from Haifa for 6 to 8 people the standard last minute slackers skipped again. I actually won't complain, traveling at 4 is so much more convenient than more. All organization plans failed so we travelled "my" way (Habeeb said "Inch Allah" way). We drove to the border with my car, grabbed a Taxi on the other side and made our way to Kerak castle (Le Crac des Moabites) stopping on the way for some great kebabs, and nice views on the dead sea shore.



As you can see I am having fun stitching pictures (it saves me buying and carrying a wide angle lense :). Once in the castle, a nice refreshing breeze welcomed us, the scenary and the feeling was so great that we got our driver to overwait for us.



We reached Petra just for the sunset and to hear fireworks and parties starting.



We spent the whole saturday going around Petra the Nabatean city, from the gorge to the monastery, under a hopefully not too hot July sun. As my last trip there, the sky was clear blue, the site beautiful and gigantic, full of light contrasts and colors. I advise you to look at the pictures here, here and here if you have some time.

The parking (follow-up)

I've been quite lazy and busy so I am catching up on stories. After my car got locked into that @$#%@#$^%$ parking on Sabbat evening, I left it over the weekend in Jerusalem because the parking was reopenning only on sunday morning.

Sunday morning I took the bus to the station then jumped in an "express" bus to Jerusalem. It was obviously full, mostly with young soldiers. I ended up sitting on the floor for the 2 hours it took us to reach Jerusalem. It was a strange feeling, I was surrounded by M16s and other guns, one guy actually dropped his charger on me and spread the ammos all over the place... I am still not used to be surrounded by firearms.
The worst part of it is that I was sitted right on top of the engine, burning my .ss, and that the guy sitting next to me was impaling me with his M16 each time he was falling asleep (about as often as I was waking him up).
Once in Jerusalem I jumped in another bus and finally reached that stupid parking. I took my car, pretended to have lost my ticket to avoid paying for the whole weekend of parking and drove back to work. It took me almost 6 hours and an experience of Israeli buses, so now I kinda try to check the signs at the entrance of closed parkings...

New Old Wonder

I spent this weekend in Jordan and we happend to visit Petra on the 07/07/07 where there happened to be the celebration for the nomination of Petra among the 7 new wonders of the world. I am happy because I got a good picture, but we didn't get to see the show because after 4 hours of waiting nothing had started. Anyways Petra was fantastic, it felt like the first time. More posts will follow if I don't get lazy and when I'll finish the processing of my 350 pictures and look at the other's 700 :).

Hiking to Nimrod

After an early wakeup relative to regular weekends, I drove with Ashok and Michelle (two colleagues on temporary allocation in Haifa) to Mt Hermon area, in the northernmost part of Israel. We decided to hike from the Jordan springs of Banias up to the Nimrod fortress despite comments that it would be way too hot to leave the shade.



We suffered quite a bit from the heat on our way up (in the 40s under 1pm sun)and from the various spiky things attacking us along the path, but the hike was worth it. We finished our long, tiring and hot day in a very nice restaurant called The Witch's Cauldron and the Milkman, and rested there for a few hours with great food.



We took the Golan heights road on the way back instead of the Jordan Valley and stopped at a few observation points to watch the scenery and ended up visiting half abandoned Syrian bunkers from the 60s. I refrained from taking pictures from the bunkers as there was modern equipment around and we were not really sure we actually were allowed to drive up there on that gravel road (we ignored the various signs in Hebrew). A gallery of pictures can found at the usual place ;).

Trying wordpress blogging

Everything is in the title, I imported my blog over to wordpress and started to play around modifying one of their templates. You can see the result here: I don't know if I'll leave blogger but I wanted to play around with something else.

Panoramas

Lately I have been playing quite a bit with my camera taking panoramas and testing various stitching tools. Autopano Pro seems to be the one that gives me the best results.
Here is an example with the view taken from my balcony, click on the pictures for a high resolution version, first with a single picture (horizontal angle of view 42°, focal ~47mm, close to one's eye sees):



Same view but stitching 4 pictures (horizontal angle of view 80°, focal ~21mm):



And the same one stitching 51 pictures (horizontal angle of view 160°, 85Mpixels on the original one):



I did a few panoramas from Jerusalem as well, here is one from the Temple Mount, in the center the infamous archeological excavation that created some troubles a few months back:

I hate Shabbat

Yesterday I drove to Jerusalem with Theo and Ashok, and guided them around as it was their first time there. We had a great day under a deep blue sky, and enjoyed the city at a slow pace finishing by a tea with Niel in his shop while he was playing some Bedouin violin.



Until then everything was fine, but the following picture summarize pretty well what happened wen we headed back to the car:



It was Friday, around 7pm and the sun was still shining, but the parking lot where our car was closed at 4 because of Shabbat. After asking around to security guards and cops we found the emergency number to call, and called once, twice, etc... At 9pm after a lunch the emergency number was still not answering and there was no way to get to the car (and it was an emergency as Theo has to catch a plane this weekend). Pretty much every person that passed by tryed to help unsuccessfully. We even got the police try to contact the owner of the garage.

In the end a man that worked nearby told us that the manager will never answer and that our car was locked until sunday morning, and that it happens every week. The manager is religious and won't answer the phone, even if this is coming from the emergency number (there is a high fine for late opening and we were ready to pay it). The man took us to east Jerusalem in a search for a taxi driver that would not observe Shabbat and we ended up getting back in Haifa around midnight.

Now I have to figure a way to get to Jerusalem Sunday to get my car back... Only good part of the adventure is that everybody was very helpful and supportive, unsuccessfully.
So I hate Shabbat, or actually I hate religious people that accept responsibilities over emergency services during Shabbat but don't answer the phone. Just give that responsibility to someone that can do it...