Hiking

Here's another shot of the lock, or whatever it is, in Cercany.

I like the composition of this shot the best, as well as the reflection in the Sazava.

Getting the exposure correct on this shot was difficult, and post processing turned out to be even more so. Nevertheless, I decided that the result was fair enough to display on Flickr, since I plan to upload a lot of photos today.

On the second day that we were in Josefuv Dul, we went on a long hike in the snow, which was very heavy for so early in the winter. We were assuming that this was because we were in the mountains. Of course, hiking is being said in a loose sense, as our "hike" was all technically within the town, and only was a hike in the sense that we wandered out into the woods surrounding the town, making it look wilder than it really was.

Here's another shot of Josefuv Dul from a location close to the dam I pictured earlier.

At one of the pubs overlooking Josefuv Dul, there's a pile of rock (I don't know whether natural or human-made) which is topped by an observation tower, or maybe a better word would be a perch or overlook, as there is no "tower" per se other than the rocks. I struggled to the top of it in the ice and snow, and shot a few photos, but none of them were as spectacular on film as in real life. I don't mind this shot, though.

On this Josefuv Dul trip, in addition to the snow on the ground, we also had a lot of snowfall while we were there. It was so heavy that, as you can see here, it obscured visibility somewhat, although since we were dressed warmly it really wasn't unpleasant, but part of the fun.

The most scenic part of the route to Branik is in Kunraticky Les, where the bike route goes parallel to the Metro between Chodov and Roztyly. This is one of the many information signs (in Czech only) giving you map and some information about the animals, not all of them wild or native to Bohemia. In spite of being in Prague, the picture of the goat is not actually an exaggeration.

At the time that I made this trip in mid-August, the leaves were already starting to change for Autumn, and they were even falling off already.

This is a sign much like a road sign that's actually for cyclists, indicating which route goes where.

The day after I finished my roll of Fujicolor Superia 1600, I tried the Plus-X roll in my Zeiss-Ikon Contina LK, and started it in Krc, taking more snow pictures. The snow still hadn't melted, so it still looked like New York more than Prague.

This is a concrete staircase that I'm fairly sure is of new construction, that helps hikers and bikers on the old Linka 011 bike trail to climb further up Vitkov (or whatever mountain this is).

This is as far as I hiked on this trip, as far as Cajirna nad Vokem, a tea house that now has an entrance on the ex-rail line. I don't know if it predates the conversion of the line, but now it is well integrated with it.

Completed in 1968, this futuristic looking hotel resembling an antenna is also exactly that, a television tower. It was also featured in the Czech film "Grand Hotel." I've tried to photograph it many times, but I've almost always been too far away, even though I've visited Liberec twice. This time I tried getting the shot with a video camera that had a still function. The resolution on the camera was awful, worse than my cameraphone, but the reason I wanted to try it was that it had a 25X digital zoom. Actually, it had a 700X digital zoom, but beyond 25X the resolution was so low that it was pointless. After uploading the .jpg to my Mac, I still had to edit the image for higher contrast because the cloud cover had played more of a role than I had foreseen.

Here's another version of the previous shot that has been edited for maximum contrast and saturation short of making it look like a painting. For some reason, shots from the video camera get vignetting when you crank the contrast up, and I have no idea why that is.

This was the tower that I shot the Jested photo from. It's in Bramberk, and is one of several observation towers constructed in the early 20th Century for tourists in the Jizerske Hory (mountains).

This is the Chata, or cottage (hardly a cottage actually) next to the Bramberk tower.

The real reason I had my Ikoflex with me was that I wanted to take some Fall photos in Cercany, so I took the train down, and finished my roll of Fomapan on the new pedestrian bridge over the Sazava.