ballawana13

http://www.smartertravel.com/photo-galleries/editorial/readers-best-travel-photos-of-2011.html?id=118&photo=24514&max_photos=7

Patience and timing always pay off. Well done.

Beautiful shots. Can you provide some color (literally) on the steps involved in getting to those results using Lightroom? thanks.

Using photobucket, these should be full size.

I hope these work.

It was actually yesterday. We had a 4th of July party and I made some "Patriotic Jello-O Shots" :cool:

 

Love the red, white and blue "patriotic" Jello shots. Bet it was lots of fun celebrating the 4th with those!

Photographic skills will atrophy like unused muscles. Practice, practice, practice.

We just booked Rome in Limo tour for our one day there in October this year. I visited Rome many years ago for 5 days (plus another 5 days in Tunis) and I know the time we have will be nowhere enough to get everything. We toured with a teacher who had been in the seminary for 7 years there and acted as our tour guide. He got us to places few were able to see and appreciate and it is years later that I really appreciate the insights we had from our tourguide. I still have some of the guidebooks from almost 40 years ago (Rome doesn't change, only the Pope does).

Okay, it's time for a few more behind-the-scenes photos.

 

Someone must have taken a few since December last year? :cool:

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Haven't been on a cruise yet, but if I get some behind the scenes photos after my Mediterranean cruise in October, I will post them. Very interesting submissions so far.

My DW and I will be celebrating our 30th Anniversary this year. We had talked about going to Italy for our next vacation (her family is from Italy and spoke Italian at home) and this was the year for our anniversary trip (family issues 5 years ago prevented us from doing much for our 25th). We saw specials advertised in January for a Mediterranean cruise that hit all the key points in Italy but also Nice, Athens and other ports. We had never been on a cruise as my DW is afraid that her normal motion sickness (cars, boats, planes, you name it) will cause her to feel trapped and sick for the duration of the cruise. We went to Hawaii for my 50th birthday and she wore the patch. It helped for the flights and when we were whale watching. She had no hints of motion sickness.

Late last year my dear MIL fell and broke her hip and passed away this year at the end of January. She had never been in the hospital and lived 94 years. We decided to spend the few dollars we got from her inheritance on excursions on our cruise and will keep her mother's memories alive. We look forward to cruising this fall and hope to do many more.

Denese96 -- We used walkie-talkies on a family reunion tour of Ireland in 2000. My family with 3 kids was traveling around the country with my sister and her family including 2 kids. We each rented cars and drove doing a circle of the country starting in Dublin. We stayed at B&B's along the way and didn't plan where we were going to stay until we got to a town we liked. The walkie-talkies were great as we were driving as we tended to get lost quite a bit. They had a range of about 2 miles and kept us in touch. None of us brought cell phones with us at that time, although now none of us including all 5 kids would be caught dead without at least one cell phone. The cells are great for the US but not so great when traveling outside the country. Radio Shack used to have a good selection of inexpensive walkie-talkies.

I have worked my way through all 107 pages of this thread enjoying the photos that have been posted and clicking through to smugmug, photobucket, picassa, flickr, snapfish, pbase, webshots, etc. to see many personal websites and photo collections. I am jealous of the talent and organizational skills so many people have in identifying locations (I really want to get my photos sorted using geotagging but haven't figured out the most efficient way to do it without having to manually tag each photo), times and people in their photos. I have been the most impressed by Dave (pierces) for his many, many excellent photos and photography tips. Keep adding to this thread with photos and comments and questions. We all learn from the exchanges and the trials and errors.

I have one minor disappointment with this thread and that is that there are far fewer photos from the Mediterranean than from the Caribbean. There must be more folks out there who have done the European experience with photos to share. We are booked on our first cruise (12 days) on the Celebrity Century in October leaving and returning to Barcelona with stops in Nice, Venice, Civitavecchia (Rome), Athens among other ports of call. I want to make sure that we capture all that we can in our time away including some of the sunrises and sunsets and wherever we go on shore by having enough batteries and memory cards to cover copious photos. I have a Canon P&S and might pick up a DSLR (I was into SLR's in the film era with several Minoltas) prior to the vacation.

Please keep posting your photos and those of you who have been on a Mediterranean cruise, post some of those photos here.

I found the countdown clock. I hope I'm not overdoing it. :cool:

My wife and I just booked our first cruise this week. We have wanted to do a cruise since the Love Boat days but she has been afraid of getting seasick. We are celebrating our 30th anniversary this year and decided we were going to Italy (her parents and all her siblings were born there). We saw a great deal on a Mediterranean cruise and said that we were going to try it this year.

All these tips and hints on this board are so helpful. Thanks.

One thing I didn't see that we always bring with us when we travel is Ziploc bags (maybe that is the cellobags that were referred to before). We use them for damp bathing suits, dirty clothes, liquids or loose change. Plenty of uses.

By the way, how do I post a countdown clock for my posts?