Those bastards!

For an unknown reason (I can only suspect my criticism for their deal with Microsoft) the guys at Yahoo deleted my flickr account. At first, I thought it was not such a big deal, since I was looking for an alternative anyway (I like flickr as a gallery but I don't want to deal with Microsoft) and right after the account deletion the photos embedded in various web pages were still visible.

A few days later, those are gone... this photoblog is ruined, my other (main) blog has a few broken articles, a number of pages which used my photos under the CC-BY-SA license are broken as well.

For this blog, I probably have to dig into the photo archive, put the files on my static site and repair about 200 posts. A big and ugly work. For 3-rd party sites, I can't to anything, as I have no idea who and how used the photos (that's the reason of freedom).

Lesson learned: do not rely on external services for critical applications (ups! this blog is hosted also on a 3-rd party service, hopefully a more trustworthy one).

Yahoo, I hope you get cancer and die. You deserve it.

Fascination with water

We may be fascinated with fire, but it's archenemy, the water, is also a fascination for us. Not that magic as the fire, but water is everywhere: waterfalls, clouds, sea waves, rain, fountains, snow, tears, ice...



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Fascination with fire

I don't know why, but certainly we, people, have a fascination with fire: we could stay for hours and look at the flames. It's like magic.



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Buses - part 2

In fact there is no part one... Part one was about a year ago when I posted on my main blog a photo made with my phone while going home, back from work, in the public transportation system in Bucharest. It was nothing special, made with the phone hels in the normal position for use wile texting for example and showing nothing more than could be recorded by the surveillance camera.

Still, it generated the most heated debate ever on my blog (I still receive now comments on it), with people attacking or defending me. Some even tried to Google bomb me, trying to make me to take down the page. This simply won't happen! But in a funny(ironic?) twist, those guys are still one of the main traffic sources on the blog :D (and indirectly ads click, which probably made me something in the range of 20$).

This controversy was one of my main reasons to start a separate blog dedicated to photography, where I published a lot of stuff, even more revealing, and the reactions were completely different (maybe because here the audience has less pompous *******?)

But Wow! what a long introduction! And for what? A couple of days ago, returning from work to home, the same public transportation system and having with me the same crappy camera phone I got the opportunity for a similar shot. Going full-circle.



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About food: mititei and other goodies

A regular reader of this blog should be already familiar with mititei, the quintessential Romanian grilled food:

You eat them with bread, mustard and drink a lot (beer or wine). As said above, they are cooked on a grill. Open air grills are the best, since your neighbours will be crazed by the flavour

If you are not "hardcore" enough, then you may cook some non-meaty stuff on that grill. Mushrooms are OK.

A total wuss may get caught with a vegetable-only grill. You don't want to be one of "these people" :D

Lacking mititei, a grill with steaks and/or sausages is passable:

No meat? Stay with the canned beans! Mwa ha ha ha ha!


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Butterlies near the forest

Camping in the middle of the nature has a lot of gifts, like parting with the insects. Those may be unpleasant, like the insect bites on your arm and legs, but also beautiful, like a butterfly encounter. You see him first near your tent and if following things may happen. You only need space on the memory card (and the space is plenty).



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In the forest

Going in the middle of the nature, even for a geeky event, I obviously couldn't stop myself from going a few steps away in the forest and looking around. You will surely find little gems.




... now I am definitely NOT bold enough to tag those as "food" :D


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FLOSSCamp photos

While still on hold from substantial photo posting due to the lack of a suitable gallery to power the content, the recent FLOSSCamp at Curmătura Ștezii proved to be a great opportunity for a large number of good or great shots, so I have to work around ways and post some.

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Exposure basics in digital photography

Another workshop, another article, this time with basics about exposure and some extra pompously called painting with light. Read, learn, enjoy.

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Light and digital photography

After the photography workshop a few days ago, I felt like not wasting the things I talked about, so I sat down for a while and put in in writing, for an introductory article about light in digital photography, covering the relation from time of the fay and outdoor photography, some words about flashes and white balance.

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Photography workshop

I am trying an experiment together with Ceata: a series of photography workshop which just started yesterday with a small session held in the Politehnica University of Bucharest campus.


We had a couple of cameras (for 5 people), my SLR and a 'Super Zoom', passed them from hand to hand and everybody got to take pictures. Hope we will follow with larger and more interesting session.

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