2008 Venice & Tuscany

The picture above was taken looking back at Abbadia Isola (that's the Abby in the center of the picture), on our way to Montereggione. The red-orange flowers are the poppies (Papaver pinnatifidium), while the red-purple flowers are called sulla (Hedysarum coronarium).

Here is my narrative describing our trip to/from and walking tour in Tuscany. I've linked the corresponding pages from Jonathan's website so that folks can jump back and forth between them.

The background on the webpages for this trip is a shot of vineyards outside of Radda-in-Chianti criss-crossing the hillside. I've taken the liberty of altering the color, but not the pattern, to match the color scheme of this site.

The images on the site, unless otherwise noted, were taken either using an Olympus C8080 Zoom (3264x2448 pixel JPEGs), or an Olympus Stylus 790 SW (3072x2304 pixel JPEGs). I usually had a circular polarizing filter installed on the C8080 on all but a few pictures. The image size of the resulting JPEGs are about 3.5 MB each. I burned the unedited version of all images onto a DVD before editing them.

Because the 790SW has an incrediblely short focal length available, most of the flower close ups were shot with that camera. The camera, being pocket-sized, was also used at dinner and traveling when I didn't want to pull out the big camera.

On this site, I've whittled the image size down to two sizes - a thumbnail I use on the page for the day, and a 640x480 pixel (or 480x640 pixel, assuming I haven't cropped or altered the size) image that I've saved optimized for web usage.

A lot of the images I doctored using Photoshop Elements, a trimmed down version of Adobe Photoshop. My most frequent adjustment was "Adjust Light & Shadows" to cope with the extremes of light and dark, "Auto Contrast" and "Auto Levels".

If you'd like the high resolution image, drop me an email (MarkTKing mac dot com) and I'll either email you a copy or set up a page where you can download the image.