Hope you enjoy the pictures! First some introductory remarks...
| All pictures were taken with my new camera, a Canon Elan 7. I used my Canon 28-105 USM II zoom lens for almost all of the pictures; a few chipmunk and bird pictures were taken with my Canon 100-300 L zoom. I used a circular polarizing filter for many of the scenery pictures. Film used for all pictures is Fuji 200 or 400 print film. (I used Fuji because I don't like the excessive contrast of Kodak Gold, but the colors in the Fuji don't seem quite as nice as Kodak film.) I mostly used fully automatic exposure, with some tweaking when I wanted a particularly fast or slow shutter speed. I've also noticed that the camera tends to overexpose low-light shots, so I set it to underexpose in those conditions. |
| All scanning was done by Kodak (the standard Picture CDs). The only editing I did was to adjust brightness/contrast on many pictures, and to crop out some bad vignetting in some pictures taken at 28mm. I still haven't figured out what's causing the vignetting - I think it's actually the hood I use (made for this lens), I don't think it's the polarizing filter, but I'm just not sure yet, I need to get this figured out. |
| I am deeply indebted to to IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com), without which I could not possibly have presented all of these pictures here. IrfanView is a freeware program for Windows that lets you batch-process image files to convert formats, resize, change the compression level, sharpen, adjust brightness and contrast, rotate, mirror-image, etc. It makes it very quick and easy to make these edits to large numbers of files at once. It also lets you easily page through large numbers of files to view them and delete the ones you don't like. |
| I have to give the excuse that it was quite hazy in the Redding area and in Paris, so it was impossible to get really nice, postcard-type scenery shots. Oh well. |
| After paging through several of the many Paris tour books in the bookstore, we settled on the "Time Out" book, and we liked it very much. For their web site guide to Paris click here. |
Day 1 cont'd: Mt. Lassen (Bumpass Hell Trail)
Day 2: Shasta Dam, Lake Shasta Caverns
Day 12 cont'd: Place de la Concorde
Day 13: Sacre Coeur, Montmartre Cemetery
Here are some thoughts I had during our trips that I think (hope) you might find interesting...
| We really lucked out, there were very few people everywhere we went in the northern California area. I think that area doesn't typically get crowded in the first place (an article I read said that this area only gets one tenth of the 6 million visitors per year that Yosemite gets), and October seems to be a great time to go, most of the tourists are gone. |
| Before we took our trip I found a really cool web site, "Mt. Shasta snow cam": click here. Besides being able to see a current image of Mt. Shasta, you can look at recent archived images, and you can see movies made from images over 24-hour periods for each day over the last week. |
| All of the restaurants we went to in Paris had these neat wireless credit card verification machines, that I assume were linked to a base that is connected to a phone line. So to pay by credit card they come to your table with the hand-held unit, swipe your card, it validates the card and prints the receipts, and you sign. That way the card never leaves your sight. |
| The Metro in Paris is fantastic. I can't personally confirm this, but one tour book I read said there's no spot in downtown Paris that is more than 1/4 mile from a Metro station. Seems plausible, though. There are 14 Metro lines, plus several commuter-rail-type lines, that cover the city. And to get from anywhere in the downtown area to anywhere in the downtown area is less than $1 if you buy books of 10 tickets at a time. One thing I found interesting was that one of the Metro lines we used several times runs on rubber tires rather than train-like wheels (all other lines we rode on had regular train wheels). I was very curious what the requirements were that drove that particular line to use rubber wheels. Another thing I found interesting was that the Metro lines we took all travel on the right-hand track, whereas the commuter lines we took rode on the left-hand track. Oh, one more thing, like in Rome, all of the Metro and commuter lines we rode on have a button or lever you need to press or pull to open the door when the train stops. It's quickly becomes obvious when you're riding, but if you're not paying attention you could miss a stop once trying to figure out why the heck the doors aren't opening. |
| Our tour guide at some point during our day-long bus tours mentioned the public pay toilets you see around Paris, and said oh, we must be familiar with them since France has exported about 50 of them to the San Francisco area. |
| We watched a bit of TV when we were tired from jet lag, and from so much walking. It was such a treat to see Starsky and Hutch and Battlestar Galactica dubbed in French. (I even recognized the Galactica episode. ;-) We also got to see the original, British version of Weakest Link. To be honest it didn't seem any different from the American version, even though I had heard it was more ruthless. Isako mentioned that the questions seemed a bit more obsecure, but more correct answers were given than on the U.S. version. |
| When we stopped at Notre Dame, our tour guide told us what the gargoyles on the old churches are for. (It was news to me, maybe you already knew.) They're actually water spouts, to divert rain runoff from the roof away from the walls. That way the gargoyles themselves, rather than the walls which are made of limestones, would eventually be eroded away by the water, and the gargoyles are relatively easy to replace. |
| Paris, for all the fastidiousness of the sanitation workers (street cleaning, people sweeping streets and sidewalks, etc), was, er... not exactly immaculate. Dog doos were everywhere, which dismayed Isako while walking around, and people were casually littering on the road even with a trash can right in front of them. It was somewhat of a relief for Isako when we toured San Francisco. She didn't have to keep her eyes on the ground while walking! |