Showing posts with label Charles Bridge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles Bridge. Show all posts
Friday, February 8, 2013
Wandering Reveals Hidden Treasures
The other day I had some spare time, so I went for a bit of a wander. I ended up at the castle, it's difficult not to. The castle dominates the city so I am frequently drawn there. It's on a big hill, and overlooks practically everything how could it not dominate the city? Plus it takes less than thirty minutes to walk there.So I made it to the castle in time to watch the daily changing of the guard. The one with all the pomp and circumstance. They change the castle guard every hour, but once a day at noon they have a regular ceremony in one of the courtyards for it. There is music and marching, the whole bit. There will be more on that in the future.
After the changing of the guard I walked into another courtyard in the castle with a good view of St. Vitus and took a 360 degree panoramic photo. Then I gave it my squish treatment and quite liked it.
This one is sort of Escher meets Dali. I particularly like the treatment the Skoda car on the right got.
Then I made my way away from the castle and figured I just head home and maybe make lunch. I passed my favorite street musician. He was playing some Gypsy Kings songs and leaning against the guitar statue this time. You might recognize him from an earlier post. I don't care, I'll give him plenty of play here.
Then a little further down the steps I saw a particularly ballsy pigeon. Granted most of the pigeons here are either ballsy or just lazy, I'm not sure which. They really don't like to fly unless they have to. I think this one was planning to dive bomb some tourists. I took a photo. Why not.
See, I'm pretty sure you can see his little pigeon brain plotting something sinister. Or at least as sinister as a pigeon can get. Maybe he is debating pooping on some tourists. Either way, it was a fun photo to take.
So, as I walked back to the Charles Bridge I decided to explore the area around the bridge and see what I could see. That is when I discovered something pretty profound.
It has taken a little while to sort out even a few words for this, so I will begin with a photo and let the words in later.
At first I just saw the helmet on the stone and wandered closer to see what it was about. It is surrounded by chains to keep people out and then I read the plague. To me this is pretty profound. For all the things I have heard about Czech people being selfish and rude this proves that is an exception. Maybe it's Prague that makes people that way. They are like New Yorkers maybe. No one in the states would ever say, "yep all Americans are like New Yorkers." Even then New Yorkers aren't bad people, they just have things to do.
I've been thinking about what logical reasons exist for a 911 memorial in Prague and then I have to stop myself. There is no logical reason for this. This is about compassion and solidarity. It's not some grandios copper gift we can stick in a harbor and look at every day. Many Americans will never see this.
This is more impressive than any kind of condolence card, because of the fact that most Americans will never even know it exists. This is a simple statement in a quiet place. In fact I gather thousands of people walk past this memorial every day and never even know it is there. It is very close the the Charles Bridge. You can look of the bridge and see it if you know what you are looking for.
I think I put the pin in the right place. Either way, I'm pretty close.
As I was looking at the memorial and taking photos of it a few people saw I was interested in something and when they walked closer and saw what it was they just kept on walking. I am willing to bet my right arm they were not Americans. It's fine they kept walking. We usually don't think of 911 as something the rest of the world needs to be concerned about, at least I don't anyway. It is a personal thing for us and I don't really think most Americans care what the rest of the world thinks about it.
Had this memorial been some sort of political message, I'm sure there would be more fanfare surrounding it. If the Czech Republic had wanted to say, "look at us, we love America. 911 sucked." I'm sure they would have done it in some other way.
To me this memorial is the equivalent of when you tell a friend you are having trouble with something and that person says a prayer for you without telling you about it. It is noble and you'll never have any idea about it. To me that exactly what this memorial is about; it is a prayer, said in silent, for 343 people you never knew. Not because you're supposed to. Not because someone told you to do it, but because you care and it's the right thing to do.
This simple, quiet gesture has endeared the Czech people to me. This makes up for all the lousy mustard on earth.
Friday, December 28, 2012
Mistakes Aren't Always Bad
The other day I had a little time on my hands and I decided to go check out this Prague Metronome thing I've heard about. If you look for it you can see it from the Charles Bridge. I misread my map and thought it was just across the Charles Bridge, not overlooking it. Oops.The story about it is that were the metronome is there was once a GIANT statue of Stalin. The statue was destroyed, blown up, and nothing sat in it's place for a long time. Then someone put up this metronome. Really if you want to know more about it read this. I understand it is a great place for skateboarders now.
Upon closer inspection, this thing looks like a repurposed oil derrick to me. It is good for something else too.
If you have an old pair of shoes you don't want anymore you can just hang them from the power line that feeds the metronome. The park where the metronome is is a very large park on a hill and affords some pretty great panoramic views of the city.
Anyway, like I said. I misread the map and was trying to get across the river on the wrong bridge. I thought the thing was across the Charles Bridge and I was wrong, but to avoid the tourists on the bridge I took a bridge in between the Charles and the one I was supposed to take. Sounds complicated, I know. It's not really. Maybe a map will help.
So, as you can see, I was not even close by any calculation; unless you count that I was in the same city. As I started walking across the square I felt a few drops of rain. "No big deal," I thought I'm sure it will be light and over soon. I was telling myself this because this was the first time I left the house without my umbrella. Well, I was wrong.
I made it all the way to the other side of the river and was now making my way back to where I thought the metronome was. Of course I was incorrectly going in the wrong direction. I thought this might be a nice time to walk without crowds and find the thing. I walked past several groups of tourists cowering under bridge arches and awnings etc. It was also pretty cold and I was pretty wet. It was of couse pouring now. My jeans were soaked, which really wasn't so bad as long as I didn't have to lift my legs up too high to do anything practical, like walking up stairs. If you haven't been here, Prague is not really ADA compliant. If you're in a wheelchair you are pretty much screwed. The jeans being wet really was the worst part. My wool jacket wasn't going to be a problem and my synthetic watch cap fortunately works a lot like wool. So, other than freezing when I lifted my legs up I was just a bit heavier than normal. I could stand to pack on a few pounds anyway, but we all know about water weight.
By the time I made it to the Charles Bridge I had decided that it was going to be dark soon and it was going to get colder then and having soggy britches was going to really be annoying. So I said to myself, "forget the metronome for today. I'm going to go home and change pants." Off I headed home, over the Charles Bridge because it was the fastest way, and it had thinned out just a bit. Well, by the time I made it to the other side of the bridge, the rain had stopped and I got to see the first thing I would call a sunset since I arrived here. Now, the sun didn't come out mind you but enough of the clouds parted to make things pretty. So, since I wasn't getting any wetter I decided to photograph the sunset.
See, I told you it was pretty. I shot from a few places on the bridge and these two were my favorite. I also took a photo of a statue with some nice clouds behind it.
Later I decided to look at the sunset photos from the bridge and make them the pretty ones up above there. All my photo buddies will notice that these images are worked a bit. Really, they aren't that bad. "Nothing you couldn't do in a darkroom," as they say and I'll have you know I only used one RAW frame to make these photos. So really, it's just a crapload of burning and dodging. Granted it took me a while to process these and I like them, possibly the tighter one the best but that isn't the exciting part.
After I finished making these I said to myself, "wow, these are really pretty. I'm going to make a wallpaper picture out of them." I do that a lot with photos I take a really like. Maybe not A LOT, I've done it 20 or so times. Well, I've been messing around this week with Photoshop CS6 and I remembered it has a new feature called "Content Aware Scaling." This is a scary thing for serious documentary-style photographers because it is advertised to make a photo fit a given size frame without removing anything from the photo.
I thought to myself, "these photos are just for my wallpaper. I'll give Content Aware Scaling a try since I don't want to crop." Well, I forgot to resize the photos at all and just did some of the CAS steps. It's really quite simple. The result was very encouraging for me.
If you've read my post about going to Washington D.C. you remember that I really liked viewing impressionist paintings when I was there. I loved them and I had been thinking a little about how to make my photography more impressionist. That is a tricky thing considering that some impressionists were in part rebelling against pure realism. Then when you consider that the camera is a pretty powerful pure-realist tool change gets tough. But when I looked at my wallpaper and saw this:
I got really really excited. This is pretty much EXACTLY what I have wanted to do. Which I suppose is more post impressionism or surrealism, but whatever. This photo will fit the screen on your 17" macbook perfectly by the way. This one is my favorite. It was a complete mistake and I can't wait to make it again. I am pretty excited about experimenting with this mistake and seeing what I can come up with.
The same effect applied to the first photo has a bit too much foreground in it for my tastes, but I'll put is up anyway so you can see. I have a lot to learn about how the computer makes calculations about what it keeps, it will be interesting to learn for sure.
So, if you're keeping score that is four mistakes for the day. They all combined to make me really happy with myself. I went back to the metronome the next day and took some photos of it. There were many skateboarders near it as well, just like the Wikipedia entry said.
