Coimbra — Jardim Botânico
Coimbra - Portugal dos Pequenitos
A small house and Macau.
Azores.
A mix between Torre the Belém, Casa dos bicos, Arco da Rua Augusta, Sé de Lisboa and some others.
A castle and Queen Isabel.
Geocaching day
On the 5th of May, some of the gang got back together for another great geocaching day! I haven’t done one since last september.
We hanged around near the 12 Years Geocaching event in Benfica for the meets, lunch and group photo, but besides that it was a caching day. After cleaning up the Benfica area (and getting some nice loquats (nêsperas) from the local market), we went to a big park called Pinhal da Paiã and cleaned it up. There were some great views from the hill top and some make-our-way-through-dense-vegetation, one “holly fuck, that big snake just passed over my feet” and a pretty neat caterpillar.
Porto
A day’s trip to Porto last month.
Av. dos Aliados
Palácio de Cristal
Peacock @ Palácio de Cristal
Lego
Lego Exhibit in Campo Pequeno’s Plaza.
Lot’s of cool standard sets and some neat “lego sculptures” of cities, beaches, pirates, portuguese monuments and traditions (like Tunas de Coimbra and Festa dos Tabuleiros de Tomar) and some bigger ones on the floor like a dinosaur, a tiger, a camel and others.
“With infinite Lego pieces, comes infinite power” - Me.
Couple days @ Porto
About a month ago I had to go to Matosinhos, (O)Porto for two days.
Looking at foursquare, I found a great restaurant with Francesinhas close by and went there for dinner. Loved it!
After that I caught a train and went to (O)Porto with the few-days-in-my-hands 450D.
It was fucking freezing! The streets were pretty much and the people that resisted were wearing hoods or something, getting me a bit worried I would end up without the camera, but everything went fine. So, let’s go to the photos!
A panorama of the emblematic avenue, facing down.
Looking up, Câmara Municipal.
A statue.
A side street and a man on a horse.
Last one in Avenida dos Aliados
Nearby is the São Bento train station, with a beautiful entrance.
Looking up, in the middle of the station entrance.
A lit building.
Next stop was the Sé…
…and the view of the town from there, with Torre dos Clérigos and Câmara Municipal scratching the sky.
After this, I walked a bit over the D. Luís I bridge and went back to Matosinhos. Just a couple more Instagram shots to finish the trip.
A train station and the next day’s breakfast.
N.R.P. Sagres
The main school ship of the Portuguese Navy, NRP Sagres, is open to the public until the next weekend, at the Lisbon ship dock in Alcântara. We went there last Sunday but there was so much people wanting to do the same and it was so cold that it was a bit unpleasant.
It was also a nice ride to test out the 50mm lens I’d just bought. The 18-55mm was borrowed so the prime was all I had.
The NPR Sagres.
We also got to see the Independence of the Seas, one of the greatest cruise ships in the world.
Taking “cable clutter” to a whole new level
The 50mm is very specific and was a pain to use sometimes, but these two shots show the one thing it’s really good at!
Exchange.
Friday night. Two strangers met on an obscure meeting at a public place. Goods are exchanged and both go on to their lives. One got a slick Canon EOS 450D + 18-55mm in a pristine state. The other got a few bills. I was the first one. That night I went and took a few photos to test out the new toy. A few of the ones that came out nicely follow.
First, a walk on Lisbon’s Downtown.
Oriente, Portugal Pavillion and the Twin Towers.
The “Fish Tank”.
Gare do Oriente.
Gare do Oriente, at the tracks. Couldn’t decide on which photo to show.
I’m really digging the camera so far, although it’s noisy (as in shutter sound, not image grain) as hell.
Reboot
For a while now that I’ve been wanting to reboot my blog. I’ve been fighting Wordpress for about a month or so but never liked it that much and the styling was taking too long for my liking and, just for the kicks, went back to tumblr and see how different was it. This tweet pretty much sums it up:
Tumblr’s theme editor *.*
— Carlos Fonseca (@carlosefonseca) January 25, 2012
Yep… it’s so easy to change the theme of tumblr that I went ahead and changed everything until I had what I wanted in a night.
Now, one thing that I just had to be able to do was embedding big photos. I love how big photos stand out on akane kinomoto and mute life and damn I did it here too. I thank them both for opening my eyes with their blogs :) Check out the posts up and bellow this one! I really hope this will make post more photo related stuff.
I’m still thinking on what can be improved here and there… We’ll see… For now my top features are there: 1024px photos and no clutter (fuck sidebars and comments and stuff…). I still want to get some links on the header but… later.
I will keep the good (damn old) posts and recover a few from a posterous blog.
On a side note, the background is from here.
Postprocessing: Vila Real de Santo António
Hi everyone! Today, after a chat with Nuno Dantas, where he showed me this blog where the author posts photos before and after being edited and I felt like doing the same!
I love photography and post gives you an ability to bring your photos to life. I’m starting this section of this almost dead blog to show what can be done with postprocessing.
To start, this panorama I took last year (2010) in Vila Real de Santo António. The panorama was put together in Photoshop and post was in Lightroom. I have to admit that I have a crush with Fill Light. Almost everything gets better with it! And some contrast and saturation/vibrance. Which was what this photo took. And some “Recovery” to correct for some excessive bright. Also, some vignette for the hallo and a dark gradient on the bottom.
Editing photos is a game of trial and error. You try moving some knobs and images get better or worse. You just need some practice and sometimes some ideias and inspiration, like this section and the blog linked above.
Let’s see if I can keep this up :D
TweetNow
Sometimes I close Twitter to be able to work but sometimes I want to post something without opening it… So I made a little Service to do it. I’m posting it because someone might like it and because this way I can re-do it faster if I need to.
Make a service in automator. Add action Run Shell Script with this (change the paths):
RESULT=`/Users/carlos/Code/TTYtter.pl -status="$@"`
/Users/carlos/Code/growl.sh -nosticky "$RESULT"
Save it (using TweetNow as example).
Then select a piece of text, right click, Services, TweetNow and Boom! A growl notification showing the result of the post appears and if all goes well the tweet is posted.
I use it mainly on LaunchBar. It indexes services so I just type something like TN, TweetNow appears, I press enter or space and it gives me a text box to type my tweet.
Really simple. Love this little things on the Mac.
Hidden settings on Twitter Mac 2.1 I’ve found looking at the screenshots in Macstories and at the code.defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.twitter.twitter-mac QuoteTweetSyntax -string "RT @{USERNAME}: {TEXT}"
Type anywhere to tweetdefaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.twitter.twitter-mac TypeAnywhereToTweet -bool YES
Avatar de-repeater for the timelines in user profile: (Apparently v2.0.2 already has this one, and less buggy lol)defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.twitter.twitter-mac UserTimelineDerepeater -bool YES
I love this one that appeared on the first version: scrolling over the twitter app, activates it:defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.twitter.twitter-mac ScrollingMakesKeyAndOrdersFront -bool YES
>