Florence Day 3 - part 2!

So after hitting the sheets for a nice sleep from 08:30 to 10 am and a nice refreshing shave and shower I was back out. I decided upon a trip to Il Duomo the biggest most famous church in the city. After walking through the main body of the church I decided to hit the 463 steps to take me to the top of the tower, the highest point in Florence. The fact that weather is pretty rubbish actually worked well with the misty scenes. Again all pictures shown here taken on the iphone5 (but I took duplicates on the proper camera for later comparison!).

After this it was shopping, including some lovely Italian leather for my gorgeous gf and then a change of shoes and socks as I was soaked again!!!!!!

A quick lunch on the way to the conference centre and into a great afternoon session on preclinical drugs to treat Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Great day (so far!)!

Florence Day 3

Ok, so it's still rather early, 08:18 to be precise but the alarm woke me over fours ago. Yes, up at 4 am and quickly ready before a 45 minute walk across town to get to this spot, which a friend and colleague had told me about. Amazingly, it was n't raining when I set out, nor cold which was good because having arrived at my destination I had some time to wait before the sun came up. Well, as expected it never did but I think I got some decent snaps anyway. All of these shots were taken with the stunningly good camera in my iphone5, can't wait to get home and do some comparison big prints versus the Panasonic micro four thirds camera to compare!!! The last two pictures (which were of course taken first) were in the virtual dark and I could not take them with my camera!!! It did start to rain again as I headed back to the Hotel San Maria Novella where I am staying but that was ok. After a hearty breakfast, I'm ready for a nap I think ;-)

Snapseed

There are quite a lot of apps available for iPhone photography and post production. In a rather boring lecture this morning I tweaked what I took last night using an app called Snapseed.

Below is the before and after......

What do you think?

Bloody weather!!!!!

Is it too much too ask for a bit of sunshine? Here I am in Florence and the forecast is for it to rain for the full six days I'm here :-(

Apparently, the sun is shining in Warboys!!!!

Florence

This place is amazing! Better than Verona? Certainly! Better than Rome, not sure, indeed more time to explore!!!!

First full day and after 8 hours in the lecture theatre I walk out into ...... rain and dusk. Bummer :-(

Oh well, so I wander downtown to hit the markets and the shops and decide to try out the HDR function. If you're not aware this takes three photos at different exposures and combines them so that everything is no too dark or bleached out. The shots look amazing considering the lighting conditions and the fact that it's a camera phone!!!!!

More to follow ........

Technology

So a few days ago I finally upgraded my phone. I've had an iPhone 3GS for three and a half years now and I've loved it. The things that it can do are amazing, beyond the phone and texting, even with pictures, I've used mine as a camera, for music and videos, a GPS for getting places and geocaching, a compass, a torch and for great web access. Anybody who says their non-smart phone is fine because it just does what it says on the tin is naive about what a smartphone can do and quite frankly is missing out on life!!

My good old 3GS was showing it's age though. For some time, as the battery got lower it would just shut down until I could plug it into a wall socket. Unfortunately, the % battery remaining was no longer 30 or 40 when this would happen but more recently had moved to 60 or 80.

So the new iphone 5 in black arrived at the weekend (Kate and I got new ones together). It was expensive and the monthly contract has gone back up but boy was it worth it!! As well as working at what seems lightening fast pace the screen (which is a critical part of course) is just wonderful. I'm liking the voice control with Siri too (now if only I could work out how to convert him into Kylie!!!).

What is actually quite scary though is the camera. It's early days and I've only taken a couple of shots and viewed them only on this wonderful screen but could it be that they are actually better than those taken on my £1000+ worth of Panasonic / Olympus micro 4/3 camera gear?????

Pictures from Florence to follow..... and that's another story :-)

P.s. How appropriate, I've just realised this is my first post from a phone

Water

Pictures to follow!!

I’ve met a few people over the years who sat they are drawn to water. Many of us say we don’t drink enough water, many of us are drawn to lakes, rivers or the seaside to enjoy leisure time. The other day when it was cold and bright I spent an enjoyable lunchtime walking down by the river in Cambridge. When I moved down from Scotland in 2002, it literally took me years to get over not being close to the mountains. My house was 40 minutes drive away from Loch Lomond. I walked nearly 50 of the Munro’s (and a pretty select 50 too!!) and then seriously got into landscape photography and the lochs played a big part in my foreground interest.

 

But over the last few years I have come to realise that Cambridgeshire is a rather wonderful place to live. From the city itself through to St Ives, Wimpole Hall, Ely, Fen Drayton Nature reserve, St Neots, Paxton pits and even up to the coast at Hunstanton. There is lots to enjoy and little to complain about, and I don’t ……………….. anymore!

These pictures were taken on a lovely lunchtime walk along the River Cam. Even urban cityscapes can come to life with a bit of the wet blue stuff!

Where I work

Pictures to follow................

 

I’m really lucky in many aspects of my life; in fact, let’s face it, pretty much all aspects of my life.

One of them is where I work, what I do and whom I work for. My company are pretty awesome really. On the back of my PhD and previous experience in pharmaceutical research I now have an exciting and stimulating job, working with a group of great people, allows a little travel and pays well.

But beyond the “walls” of work the surrounding area is quite nice too. I have a nice safe place to run where the floor is very level and there is limited traffic, allowing me to zone out if I want. And whilst I used to take time to walk around the park as part of my lunch break the running has taken over so I rarely do that now. But in an attempt to take a few more pictures I threw my camera bag into the car the one day a few weeks ago when it was very bright and cold and managed to capture some decent images of the surrounding area. In years or decades to come these will act as a good reminder!!

The Faceless by Simon Bestwick

Interesting this one, and I’m not quite sure how much I liked it even 24 hours after finishing it!!!

The story is essentially of an evil family who brought mutilated war hero’s back to a local sanitarium after the first world war but used their suffering for their occult purposes. After all this had dies out a pedo ring with occult tendencies rediscovered what was going on and managed to harness the powers of the previous horrors for their own uses. The story centers on one individual who is a tv psychic. His show is made up but he does have the sight and is eventually tricked back to the home town as the final part of the jigsaw to allow all of the “spindly men” (the dead and deformed soldiers who usually have to wear masks as they suffered facial damage) back onto this plane. In the end all hell breaks loose and the goodies fail to stop the oncoming onslaught (this makes a refreshing change!) and everybody bails out of the country as it is consumed with evil only for the one remaining heroin to take flight to Europe with her unborn child. However, she may hold the ability to reverse things!! Set up for a sequel?

Good, but at times frustrating, especially towards the end. However, after a little while and the dust settles I’m now thinking that was actually better than I thought whilst reading it.

Lee Childs - Jack Reacher - The Killing Floor

Thought it was about time I gave Jack Reacher a try. There’s a bit of hype about the film coming out this year, although why you would get someone as short as Tom Cruise to play somebody who is supposed to be 6 ft 2 I’ll never know!! Kate (and her Dad!) seem to have read them all up to the most current as well so I felt like I was missing out a little. Apparently, the early ones are the best and towards the end of the series the quality drops off as it seems the author is just on a mission to get a novel out every year. I had recently read The Innocent by David Baldacci, in which he introduces John Pullman, a hard man services investigator, arguably a bit of a copy of Reacher, and I liked Pullman quite a lot. So, this novel starts out with an unbelievable coincidence. Reacher just happens to get off a Greyhound bus and walks for miles through the rain to a town where unbeknown to him, his brother was murdered a few days ago. As he eats his breakfast in the diner he is arrested and taken to the nearby prison for the weekend along with the softy banker who seems to be linked somehow. The banker is in fact a central figure in a counterfeiting scheme based on the town and after lots of people are brutally murdered whilst Reacher figures things out he eventually gets to kill all the bad guys, including he who blew away his brov. A decent novel it rolled along quite nicely without ever having me racing back to my Kindle. I liked the writing style and found it all quite enjoyable really, but it would n’t make my top ten. I think I prefer John Pullman to Jack Reacher but I'll read more of both.

Florence

I'm a lucky boy, more work travel on the horizon. This time, a week in Florence :-) I'll be there for a conference from the Wednesday to Sunday, well actually I'll miss the last day to travel back to avoid missing another night with my kids but I'll also be there on the Tuesday for a one day seminar on medical imaging. It will be March by then so I should see some sun. I've just been on Tripadvisor and booked the second most popular hotel in city (the most popular was a 40 minute walk from the conference centre!). So, now I just need to find a way to upgrade my three year old Panasonic GF1 camera before then ........ if only I could decide what exactly I want!!!!