Here’s September’s desktop… an image shot at sunrise over Santorini Island, Greece. If you ever get a chance to go here, do it. It’s definitely one of my favorite places in the world… they have red, white, and black beaches all on one tiny island just 12 mi long and about 1 mi wide. Awesome!
September 2010 Desktop - Click image to preview
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I just got back to Wichita after graduation in TX. It feels pretty good to be done! Now I have some free time to really start processing through all 19,807 images from the TREK…
Also, for graduation my family gave me a trip to New Zealand and I’m really excited to go. I am going to start planning the trip over Christmas and hopefully will go sometime this Spring. I will be uploading a few bits and pieces of both stills and video over the next few days, so keep an eye out!
For now, I have this panorama that came from the Highlands on the western part of Scotland. Enjoy! 
I am sitting at Starbucks in London’s airport getting ready to get on a flight back to the United States. It’s pretty wild how fast the whole trip has gone! We have been tremendously blessed and I’m overwhelmed with thankfulness for the trip as a while. God has been good and has blessed us extraordinarily and we are thankful for all your prayers.
We have just left Scotland where we have been for the past 6 days. We started in Edinburgh where we slept a stone’s throw from Edinburgh Castle and only a block away from the Royal Mile. We spent time photographing St. Giles Cathedral, where John Knox preached which was pretty cool.
It was cold, wet and windy. Just as we expected. A pretty stark contrast from the Arabian Desert that we had been in just hours before we arrived in Edinburgh. We spent a couple of days wondering around Edinburgh and trying to figure out how to get out to the Isle of Skye. We had bumped into a geologist in Kathmandu that was from the UK and he highly recommended we go there. So we were trying to find a 3-day tour that fit within our schedule and enable us to get out there. Unfortunately, many of the tours required booking 48 hours early or were already full.
So we decided to rent a car and just drive up there on ourselves, attempting to hit many of the same sites our tour would have. But walking home one night we went by a tour office and stopped in just to ask if they might have open tours and sure enough they did! Boy we were glad! It turned out awesome.
We started our tour the Saturday morning at 9AM and it lasted until Monday evening. We drove up through the Scottish Highlands where we saw countless lochs, including Loch Ness, tons of castles and breath-taking scenery.
Unfortunately our first two days were nothing but cloudy skies, cold winds and freezing rain. Pretty miserable conditions and not to great for photography but we managed to get some images I am pretty happy with. At one point our guide stopped the bus near a trail up to a waterfall. When we got out, it the skies looked as if we wouldn’t have any precipitation for awhile but just 5 minutes into our hike up to the waterfall we started getting pelted with freezing rain/little ice pellets. It was crazy but actually pretty fun! We have fun putting our gear to the test.
The rock structures and geology here was just fascinating. Our guide Karen, who was a tremendously wonderful tour guide, talked about how unique the geology on the island is for quite some time.
At the end of our second day, which was spent completely driving around the isle of Skye (about 50 mi long by 25 mi wide) we went up to a viewpoint that looked over a bit of the isle. The wind was blowing about 65MPH and our temperature gauge read 38°F. It was raining and sleeting but we the shot was just so great! So we got out of the bus, fighting the wind to even walk, and went up on this cliff to make a panorama. We couldn’t set anything down because it would be blown right off the cliff, including my camera or tripod. In fact, I wore my pack just to give me some extra weight.
I wish we had a picture of Dad and I standing there on the cliff, working in these extreme conditions. Dad was literally hanging on the tripod with all his weight, trying to keep it in place while I managed to get the camera mounted and began shooting a few images to make our panorama.
I was actually really enjoying it cause I could see the landscape was absolutely fantastic I knew we were getting a sweet shot and just when I thought Dad was about to look up and say he was cold and wet and wanted to go back to the bus I heard him yell something over the roar of the wind but couldn’t make it out. He said it again, “THIS IS AWESOME!!!” Haha. Just what I was thinking too.
You would never know it from the images but here’s a couple that we shot in the midst of that little adventure:
Then we headed down to the coast where we saw an amazing waterfall that goes straight into the ocean and a few stunning cliffs above the water. Again it was quite windy and wet down there but not nearly as bad as it had been up at the summit.
The next day we had a beautiful sunny day with clear skies. A great day for the long drive back to Edinburgh but we wished that we had that weather during the day we spent on the Isle. We went down to a little bay before leaving the island and caught a few views of the isle (we could actually see further than 1/8th mile, much better than the day before!
We didn’t see tons of castles when we were on the Isle of Skye but we did see quite a few in the Highlands in between Edinburgh and the Isle. My favorites were the one that Monty Python was filmed in, and another that the movie Highlander was shot in (Eilean Donan Castle.)
I have a ton more images but haven’t looked through all of them yet. I realize I haven’t posted up any images from Zambia or Dubai but I we have just been so busy I haven’t been able to make time for it. I will get some up when we return to the US with a good internet connection.
If you are wondering why there haven’t been much updates lately its because we decided to leave Athens for awhile and go out to the Greek Islands to Santorini. Our internet access was quite limited so I didn’t really get a chance to upload anything. Santorini is small island series of islands formed by a volcanic caldera about 8 hours ferry ride from the Pireaus (the port in Athens.)
We spent most of the day on the 3rd heading out there and when we arrived we rented a smart car and started zipping around the island. An amazingly beautiful place with red, white and black beaches on different parts of the island.
We are now back in Athens and we head to the Ukraine tomorrow (we leave at 5:20AM!) so I wanted to get this update in before we depart. We’ll be in Ukraine for only 3 days before we head out to India.
I’ve got about 25 images online from Santorini and you can see them all in full screen slideshow view by clicking here or by clicking any of the images. Tell me what you think!
On the northern part of Santorini Island at Oia. We just parked where you see the boats in the bottom left and hiked up (fast!) to catch sunset in time.
I was up on a wall to get the shot I wanted, elevated above everything else and Dad shot this while I was at work. Thanks Dad!
I wanted to shoot the sunset over the island from a high location and we ended up about 1300ft above sea level on this giant ledge we found. (six shot stitched panorama)
This was at the highest point on the island, about 2000ft above sea level. For this shot i mounted my camera on my tripod with the fisheye and the remote shutter release to fire it. It was so windy we could barely hold it up there.
- Click here to view the slideshow and see them full screen.
- The metro under Syntagma Square
- A series of different images shot around Syntagma Square in Athens.
The changing of the guard. They would walk and hold their legs out as seen in this shot for quite some time and then go down in perfect unison.
A close-up of the guard's uniforms.
This little greek guy gave away bird food to anyone that wanted to feed the pigeons..
Well it’s about 3:15AM here and I just woke up from a 7 hour nap… not quite on the schedule yet. This morning we got up and decided to go to the Acropolis. We went out on the street and started trying to flag a taxi… We had a few stop for us and when we told them where we were going, they simply drove off.
We figured only one or two might do this, but we literally had 9 or 10 cabbies look at us and sneer and then drive off. Finally, we had a nice guy that picked us up and of course Dad had to ask the cabbie why. He responded with “only stupid people at the acropolis.” Guess we are ’stupid people’ but I don’t have a problem with it, the Acropolis was extraordinary! Mars Hill is right there too so we spent some time bumming around on the same steps Paul walked on so it was pretty extraordinary. Dad took the time to sit down and read Acts 17 from the top of hill and that was pretty neat.
Unfortunately, the Acropolis as a whole was under construction (scaffolding EVERYWHERE) so it was kind of tough for shooting, plus there was a nice overcast sky but it was still pretty amazing. Here’s a few shots.
Click here to view the slideshow and see them full screen.
This is a shot of the city of Athens from the hill on which the Acropolis sits. I used a special lens called a Tilt/Shift that allows me the extremely shallow Depth-of-Field which is what makes this shot look very much like a model.
This cross was in a wooden door in some ruins at the base of the hill.
Believe it or not, this is one of the few shots that we could get without there being any construction or scaffolding marring the image!
A shot of the city of Athens from upon Mars Hill. It's pretty extraordinary to sit up there and try to envision what the place looked like when Paul preached from that peak.
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