Today's Guest Photo Blog is brought to you by Jeff Fidyk, a wonderful photographer with a natural eye for creating images that are visually quite interesting.  On a recent trip to Nova Scotia, Jeff created these images below.

I always enjoy taking a different perspective on things, whether it’s a matter of opinion or with respect to photography.  Case in point is a recent excursion we made to Peggy’s Cove while visiting Halifax for a few days.  Of course the feature attraction at Peggy’s Cove is the iconic lighthouse perched atop a barren landscape of rock that cascades to the Atlantic.  However, me being me, I actually took a greater interest in exploring and photographing the area leading up to and adjacent to the famous icon. 

Not to say that I didn’t shoot the lighthouse; I did walk away with nine shots of the lighthouse itself from different vantages.  My point is exemplified by the 81 photos I took of the various things in the area that caught my interest and in my opinion express more about the area and of our experience there than simply focusing on one simple icon that every other person with a camera will also have added to their collections.  These images are of a few of the things that caught my interest.

 

I am using an Olympus E-500 with a 14-45mm lens.  For many of the shots I let the camera auto-select the aperture and shutter speed and I fine-tuned the white balance.  I was really pleased with the accuracy achieved with color tones and brightness using this method.  I really enjoy taking detail shots as illustrated by the stack of lobster traps, inadvertently decorated with the colourful buoys.  The tattered old boat with its detailed ribbing was also intriguing.  In the case of the boat, the phrase “one man’s garbage is another man’s art” is likely appropriate.

I have sat in front of the large black and white photograph for years.  It hangs on the wall just outside the women's fitting room in a local department store.  There are two chairs next to the photo to accommodate husbands and boyfriends caught in that fashion limbo that requires us to wait patiently for our significant other. 

As I  whiled away my time in this limbo, I have come to know this photograph rather well.  Shot from inside an apparently empty Paris cafe, the darkness of the interior contrasts with the brightness of the summer day outside.  There is only one person visible in the image and they are caught, hanging mid stride in the air, as they run across a wide roadway.  While a few cars and one street car can be seen in the photo, it is otherwise a quiet, static photo. 

I don't know whether it is my innate love of Parisian cafes, the dynamic range captured in this image, the sense of depth, or the feeling of a moment caught in time, but I have always enjoyed looking at this image.  I imaged that it may have been shot in the 70's as the pedestrian's pants look like they may be bell bottoms, but there wasn't much else I could derive from the unnamed image in the department store.

Fast forward a great many years until today, sitting with my old friend the Parisian cafe image, I decided to photograph it with my iPone and then mail it on to my main email program at home  This may sound like I was pirating the image for my own use, but actually, I wanted to run a program called TinEye that I have recently used as a reverse image search tool.  You point TinEye at an image on the Internet or on your computer and it will find other examples of the image on the Internet.  I use it to determine who is using my stock images as I really have no other way of finding examples of my photos being used on web sites.

When I loaded the photo from the department store into TinEye, it quickly showed me a number of other instances of the image appearing on the Internet and I learned that it was called "Le Cafe de Flore tote le matin" or "Cafe de Flore, Early Morning", shot by Jeanloup Sieff in 1975.  The search also produced references to a book sold by Amazon called "Paris Mon Amour" with Sieff's image on the font cover.  For less than $14.00 this book is a marvellous collection of Parisian images taken by photographers from the late 19th century onward.  Sieff, who passed away in September 2000, was a fashion photographer who was well known for his work with such magazines as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Glamour.

My old friend the department store photo now had a pedigree and just for the heck of it, I decided to see if the Cafe de Flore still existed.  I fired up Google Maps and entered the name of the cafe and sure enough, on the ground floor of the Hotel Jardin de Paris, on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue Saint-Benoit, sits the Cafe de Flore still in operation today! 

Now of course, I had to see if there was a street view from the cafe to try and stand where Jeanloup did when he took the image and indeed I could "stand" on the street just outside the cafe.  While some of the businesses have changed, the newspaper kiosk is still across the street from the cafe and the surrounding buildings are still the same.  The main difference I think is the amount of traffic on Boulevard Saint-Germain.  Today rather than hovering above the street as the pedestrian in the photo did, you would have to fly across if you wanted to avoid the passing traffic!

I am amazed how technologies now can come together to help solve these visual mysteries and I am also pleased that now, as I sit beside my old friend, I better understand exactly where this image was taken and by whom.

There is not much to say about this shot other than it is great to be able to just walk out into your own backyard and find an image like this.  For all the journeys I take half way around the world, some of the most astonishing images I have are taken steps away from my back door!

First, don't touch that camera dial that gives you black and white or sepia photos right out the camera.  Yes, go ahead and use the VIVID or LANDSCAPE color settings, but please don't go so far as throwing out most of the color in your photographs.  Wait until you get back home and do just a little post processing to make your photo into an old time sepia image. 

This image was taken during a one day port excursion in Seattle.  As we pulled into Pier 66 it was dry but cloudy.  By the time we made it to the top of the Space Needle it was cloudy almost to the street and very rainy.  A wall of fog wrapped around the observation deck with no sense of whether you were one foot or a hundred off the ground.  As I stood there the fog lifted for a few moments and I was able to quickly take a some photos down into the city. 

Looking at the photos once I was warm and dry, I could tell that the rain had wiped out most of the color and some of the sharpness in the images.  Rather that try to take the pictures through post processing and make a sunny day out of a downpour, I decided to emphasize the fog and the wet instead.

Converting the image to sepia eliminated what little color was in the image and leaves the viewer to concentrate on the forms of the buildings instead.  Adding a bit of vignetting draws the viewer's attention to the center of the image and gives the entire picture a vintage feel.  I think the image works much better as one that embraces the weather conditions of the day.  What didn't work as a color image works much better as a simple toned image. 

Many first time cruisers are as afraid of the shore excursions as they are of getting seasick.  They believe that they will be trapped on a bus full of octogenarians slowly moving from tourist trap to tourist trap, pausing only for the occasional photo stop or pee break.  You can avoid this scenario with just a little preplanning that will let you chart your own course and go your own way.  Here we have outlined some alternatives that you might want to consider to keep you from seeing everything through the window of a tour bus:

1. Wait until you step off the ship to book your tour: this doesn't work in all ports of call, but in some, local tour companies set up kiosks to hawk their services.  If you like to be flexible and take things as they come, you can find some good deals on interesting excursions right on the dock.  A number of ports also have hop-on-hop-off buses stopping close to the pier.  These buses will give you an entire tour of the city and allow you to get off and explore whenever you want.
2. Book ahead of time via the Internet:  typing the name of the port followed by "city guide" into any search engine will get you a number of leads to local tours and guides. This doesn't help determine the reliability of a guide halfway around the world though.  We use sites like cruisemates.com and cruisecritic.com to look for recommendations from other cruise passengers who have visited in the ports we are interested in.  Booking a local guide is best in cities where there is little English spoken or where the tourist infrastructure doesn't cater to foreigners.  We have booked our own car and driver in St. Petersburg on a couple of occasions and were able to visit a number of places where only the locals go.
3. Cruise ship walking tours: while you will still be with a group of fellow passengers, walking tours will usually take you to the center of town or to places where tour buses simply can't go.  You will still probably hit regular tourist attractions, but you will be able to experience the port at street level and at a more relaxed pace.
4. Your own walking tour: if you arm yourself with a little bit of local information, you can often go exploring on your own and then find your way back to the ship the same way you left.  Cruise ships will provide maps that will help you navigate most ports of call.  Using the Internet to research a port ahead of time is a good strategy as is asking your crew about the interesting things to do in port.  There are a number of iPhone apps that will help you explore as well.  Take a look at Real Southeast Alaska app that will provide information about major ports and as well as less visited ones.  Cruising Alaska: A Guide to the Ports of Call is an entire book (and costs as much) that you can carry around on your iPhone.  City Listen provides MP3 sound files that let you take your own walking tour of some cities including New York and Paris.  Continuing in the vein of "there's an app for that", the iPhone apps store has guidebooks and maps for most major ports of call, giving you the ability to carry a great deal of information around in your pocket.
5. VIP Cruise Tours:  more expensive than regular shore excursions, these tours have fewer guests and go to more exotic places.  These are great for passengers who want a little more excitement but don't want to make independent plans.  As an example, in Juneau, a VIP gold mine tour takes guests into an abandoned gold mine.
6.Tours with local photographers: it used to be you had to book these kind of tours on your own, often at considerable expense.  Now, passengers can find cruise tours lead by local photographers who will know the places to go at the proper time to catch the best light.  There is a great photo expedition you can book on some cruises that takes you whale watching and hiking with a local photographer in Juneau.  Princess also has several photo expeditions you can book on the Canada/New England run.

If you are interested in finding the path less travelled, there are a number of options available to the resourceful cruise ship passenger.  If you have your own ideas about getting off the tourist trail, please share them with us here.