Of the many challenges of life in today’s Cuba, housing must rank among the greatest. There’s not enough of it, much of the available housing stock is in terrible shape, and the Cuban legal code makes it hard to legally transfer ownership — so moving households is a big challenge.
In this shot from above (courtesy of a hotel upper-floor window), you can see how some units were turned into small yards after their roofs collapsed. Continue reading
So given that only about 2% of Cubans own a car, and that there is no dedicated city-to-city transit system (a la Greyhound busses or Amtrak in the U.S.), how do Cubans get from place to place?
Well, basically, it’s not easy.
In rural areas, people can make do with more-traditional approaches — you’ll see a lot of semi-modern carriages drawn by horses out here. I’m guessing this works pretty well for trips into town from farms in the hinterlands. Continue reading
When people find out you’ve been to Cuba, they always seem to want to talk about the cars (at least in the U.S.).
So, just to get our footing, let’s start by talking about license plates. It didn’t used to be this simple, but relatively-modern Cuban license plates make it easy to tell whether a vehicle belongs to the government, or to a private citizen. Government vehicles have license plates with a blue strip on their left end:
Since most cars and trucks in Cuba are owned by the government, you’ll see a lot of license plates like the one above / left. I’m not sure what the “B” stands for, but it’s nearly the only letter you’ll see on Cuban government plates. One prominent exception is the “T” plate (above / right) — these are for government vehicles reserved for tourists, namely rental cars.
License plates for privately-owned vehicles lack the blue strip, and always start with a “P” for good measure:
A minor detail, perhaps, but you’ll see where this comes into play in subsequent posts.
Our family recently returned from a “people-to-people” tour of Cuba — one of the most unique sights was definitely “La Milagrosa,” in Havana’s Colon Cemetery:
This is the grave of one Amelia Goyri de Adot, a woman who died in childbirth at 23 years of age on May 3, 1901. Her infant son who also died was buried in her casket, at her feet.
Olympus just announced some interesting new items in the high end of their micro-4/3 system line-up. I’ve been shooting almost exclusively with Oly gear since I went digital years back, so thought I could add a useful thought or two based on my experiences.
First off, Olympus announced a special, limited edition of the OM-D E-M5 Mark II. The E-M5 was just “refreshed” to the Mark II model (with lots of interesting new capabilities) a few weeks back — this new special edition is limited to 7,000 copies world-wide, and comes in a special titanium finish (for the top and bottom plates). 
Some months back I purchased an Olympus 40-150mm f/2.8 lens (officially, the M. Zuiko Digital ED 40-150mm F2.8 Pro lens) and MC-14 1.4x teleconverter for my E-M1 body. I’d given them some exercise on a road trip previously, but when an opportunity came up for a “Tripod Session” at a local butterfly pavilion, I thought I could give them a real workout on the facility’s residents.
Recently, Topaz Software released the latest in their line of plugin and post processing software — Impression. The idea is that this software (which you can run stand-alone, or as a Photoshop plugin) can turn a photograph into something resembling a painting. And you can choose from approximations to any of a number of painting styles, with lots of things to tweak. It’s available at a discount through the end of the month, so I thought I should download it and a trial code and give it a spin.
My raw material was this shot of aspen trees turning — I took it last weekend down in the San Juan mountains thinking it’d make nice wallpaper for my various gadgets. Starting off with one of Impression’s “Van Gogh” presets and tweaking a bit, I rendered the original into this:
We recently had the opportunity to visit the city of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A bit out of our way (even on a trip along the Adriatic), but we primarily wanted to see one iconic structure — Stari Most (“Old Bridge”).
The original version of this structure was built on the orders of Suleiman the Magnificent between 1557 and 1566, and it stood for 427 years with no issues. But it was a casualty of the Balkan Wars back in the 1990s, and so had to be subsequently rebuilt in 2004.
Still, it’s said that the (new) Old Bridge is made largely of limestone blocks from the (old) Old Bridge, salvaged from the bottom of the Neretva river.
An abstract shot from the Ice Castle in Breckenridge, Colorado:
One of the fun things about living in Colorado is the plethora of great photographic subjects at hand. Among these, a new one (to me) is the “Ice Castle” built in Breckenridge during the winter. Made out of thousands of icicles, with imbedded LED lighting, it’s fun to walk through and a great photo subject. The lighting changes colors every few seconds, so you’ll need to be on your toes if you want to capture a formation lit with a particular color — and a tripod (or one of these) along with some sort of remote (corded or cordless) are pretty much essential.
Oh, and one more piece of advice — look up! If you limit yourself to photos taken on the level, you’ll miss some really interesting abstracts like this.
I recently picked up Olympus‘ new pancake kit zoom lens (formally, the 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 EZ lens) and its automatic lens cap. Rather than boring you with test charts and such, I thought taking it out on a walk would be more interesting (and help give everybody a better idea of its benefits and limitations).
For starters, the lens’ big benefit is size (naturally, for a pancake) — at least for the time being, it’s the shortest pancake zoom for the micro-4/3 system, extending just 22.5mm from its mounting flange. Above, you see my E-M1 with an Oly 12-40mm f/2.8 lens mounted, next to my E-M5 hosting the 14-42mm EZ lens. Even with the grip attached, the E-M5 is pocketable (well, in a decent-sized coat pocket) in this configuration. The automatic lens cap isn’t exactly cheap, but that extra $30 buys you an impressive bit of engineering in a small slice of plastic — and makes this combo a potent and quick-to-use street shooter.
But on to the walk…