Flyin' on Business Class

Last month I had an opportunity to try out how flying on business works. I flew a few times back and forth to the US earlier, but I always took the Economy seats. It is possible to survive such a travel, but usually hard to sleep on the not too comfortable seats and the space is not really much for a 1.93m tall person with long legs like me. Not to mention the amount of attention you get from the flight attendants throughout the flight.

This time I did not complain about the available space, food, nor the service.

I flew from Budapest to San Francisco, through New York and from Los Angeles to Zürich through Atlanta. These 4 flights were all operated by Delta this time.

The check-in experience was not that really great in Budapest: I had to wait for about 10-15 minutes in the priority check-in line. Well, there were a lot of people even for Business class. The security was fast and when I arrived to the gate, I took the priority line to the airplane, so I could settle very fast.

Leg space: more than enough. There were a lot of thing stuffed into the back pocket in front of me. Menu, blanket, pillow, magazines, headphones and a nice small bag of useful stuff for a long flight:

The stuff in the bag were the following:

• Socks: the A/C was on full throttle of course, so it was pretty useful.
• Eyeshade: I think I've used it, pretty practical.
• A Delta discount flyer: useless.
• Toothpaste and toothbrush: nice touch.
• A pen: well, good for a swag.
• Earplugs: practical for someone who needs these kind of things.
• Tissues.
• Various creams: my girlfriend liked them, she told this is a good brand. I am not a cream-geek, so I don't know.
• HintMint: I did not really like it. :)

Nice pack, I kept it.

I could not complain to the menu either. There were 4 courses, the main course could be chosen from a couple options. I chose some chicken. The portion was big enough. The last course was the dessert. This time, it was a chocolate cake:

In this photo, you can also observe the amount of leg space available...

But back to the desserts. This was the selection:

Cheese-cake, ice cream sundae, chocolate cake, fruits. Not bad. :)

30 minutes after I finished with my portion, the flight attendant asked if I asked for strawberries. She was very sorry to forget who was it. I said to not worry I could take it, so she left it to me:

I expected to have a plug for my laptop, but unfortunately it was not working. First of all, it was very hard to plug the Apple charger to the socket due to the limited space around it. After I managed to force it in, it turned out that there is no power in my seat. The flight attendants couldn't help. Argh! Next time I'll bring an extension cable which will eliminate at least that part of the problem.

The seat was very comfortable, though. The economy seats usually have one button to change the tilt of the back, but here there were about 20 different buttons to change everything: the tilt of the back, the feet position, the length of the footrest, etc. It was definitely more comfortable than the economy ones.

The headphones were noise-canceling ones, watching movies was nice with them. My program was: Adjustment Bureau, Unknown, and the first half of Hall Pass.

After the movies, I made some work in the computer (until the juice lasted), and then got some food before landing, then we arrived in NY in time. I tried not to sleep on this flight, because this was an in-day flight (from noon to afternoon).

Oh, btw, there was Rene Russo on the plane. She looked much younger than she is.

At JFK, I was the second person out of the airplane and I had 0 waiting time at the immigration office. The luggage waiting time was slightly longer, but there were no real issues, I managed to catch my next flight to SF.

In the JFK - SF flight, there were no "Business" class, just "1st" class. Fancy! At least the plug worked there, and I could use the interwebs for a $10 fee. It was funny posting to FB in 30k feet high. Well, this is not really a Business Class benefit, everyone could do that, only they did not have power plugs or just on selected seats. The leg space was big enough here as well, though no stuffed bag this time. The noise-canceling headphones were there as well.

The food was really good this time, too. I was really tired this flight (it was 4am in Budapest time when we took off), so that after doing some internet browsing and finishing Hall Pass (it was not that bad as I expected), I got some sleep. It was around 11:30pm local time by the time I arrived to SFO.

The way back was similar, with minor changes: internet in the first flight, sleep on the second. They asked me if they would wake me up for breakfast. After consuming the dessert (cheesecake), I managed to sleep about 6 hours.

So this was my "Business experience". I was appreciated it, I can tell that the seats were much more comfortable. It is also true that the ticket was not cheap.

As a side note, the best economy experience I had was in a flight from Zürich to Sydney through Dubai. Can you guess which airlines? Yes, Emirates. I flew on the Airbus A380 between Dubai and Sydney. There was an on-demand video with all the new titles, slightly bigger legroom than the usual economy standard, and I got two stickers which I could stick into your seat to indicate whether or not you wanted to get woken up for breakfast. The linked video introduces the first and the business class in the A380, I suggest taking a look at it. Pretty funny. Well, one time, maybe...

Mainau Island

On Sunday last week we went to Mainau island. This is a beautiful park close to the german border with a lot of flowers.

It was a really nice walk in the island. For me the most exciting part was the Butterfly House, where I could practice the macro-photography. It is a very humid closed place where there are plenty of flowers, trees and butterflies. Catching them was not really hard, some of them liked to fly to visitors, they were not shy.

I had to realize that macro photography is not really easy. Millimeters count if it comes to the focus. I wonder that maybe the autofocus system of my camera is not perfect (I tried to not move too much), I made a lot of blurry photos.

Besides bad ones, I made a couple of good one, and I'd like to share the best 3 with you:

When we left the island, I just simply loved the shadows on the bridge:

That was a really nice afternoon!

More photos maybe coming later if you have more time or the demand is really high. :)

Sunset at the beach

One evening we headed towards Clearwater Beach. We parked the Mustang ("Mustang? What Mustang?" - you might ask. Well, I'll probably talk about that later), and went to the shore.

The water was pretty warm, Andi enjoyed it very much:

The sunset was beautiful, we saw rays coming through the clouds. When I took shots of the Sun, I got these kind of sepia-like photos. This style reflects the humid and hot weather:

Here the sun almost went down entirely. I would have been happy to have a 70-200 with me, this is all the quality I had with a 24-105: I had to crop, this is 1/4 of the original photo:

Later, the Sun disappeared behind the horizon, but its rays were still visible. This painted the sky to more bluish (at least this is how the camera set the white balance), as you can see it in the following photos.

In this shot on the left, you can see Pier 60:

Photo from the pier:

This place is busy even at and after sunset. There are street musicians, street performers, craftsmen every day. This event is called "Sunsets at Pier 60", it is actually a "daily festival", which happens around the time of sunset (whether permitting) and they even have a webpage: www.sunsetsatpier60.com:

As I progress with the photos from Florida, I'll post some more.

Enjoy!

Sunset at the top of Fort Harrison

We've arrived back to Zürich after a couple weeks of Florida, and I started to look at the photos we made.

In the first days, we went up to the top of the hotel, to see the view and see the sunset.

The following photos are made there:

This photo was taken after sunset. The sun already set behind Clearwater Beach, but it painted a beautiful sky.

I made this long-exposure shot with a tripod, I liked the pattern that the light draws, and the color of the sky. (The signature is on the wrong side, I'll replace this photo once I get back my Pro account :) Update: Done. :) ).

The shadows were really nice here, plus the color of the sky was still beautiful. The idea of the photo is coming from Andi, but the execution was mine. Another interesting fact about this shot is that I did not adjust the saturation at all.

More photos coming as I have some time to process them!

Glarus - Klöntalersee

Last weekend we decided to go to hike to some nice place with friends from the firm. Diana chose a nice hike: from Glarus to Klöntalersee. The photos were awesome in the webpage, there was a lake, there were mountains, the forecast predicted nice weather, the expected duration was only 2.5-3 hours (in one direction), which meaned that if I stopped to take some photos, it is only 4-5 hours, which was totally enough. So it sounded like a very nice trip!

We departured around 11 by car fro Zürich. The distance was not too much, but we stucked in a traffic jam for about an hour, so it took more than two hours to get there.

The weather was really great during the trip:

The clouds looked even better through (polarized) sunglasses:

In the traffic jam we listened to many slovak child songs, and a very famous star from the 60s. We listened him so many times that I though we'd never forget his name. But I did. I even sang one of his song in karaoke earlier, but unfortunately it does not come into my mind now. Juro, can you help me out? :)

When we arrived to the starting point in Glarus, the battery of my iPhone 3G just got empty. It was a pity because I wanted to use that to record the track of the hike for geotagging the photos. Fortunately we had a T-Mobile G1 with MyTracks, which lasted until the end of the hike.

We headed uphill. We did not really know where to go, we hoped that sings would show the way to the waypoints listed in Activity Workshop page. We went through meadow and forest:

At this crossing, we presumed that we were going to the wrong direction, since we had to go down slightly:

But the road headed upwards later. Looking back:

We stopped for a short while at 778m. Everyone had a rest except the photographer:

Yes, this route still goes upwards!

But no, we did not plan to go THAT high:

Nice view while looking back (HDR):

The way behind us:

In the forest:

Elevation: 1015m, it was a good achievement so far. We wanted to go to Schwamhöchi, so we still went to the right direction:

But after that, we were lost. We followed a path which we should not have done, so we ended up missing Schwamhöchi with the nice view to the lake, so I could not take a nice photo of it.

At the highest point of our trip, we arrived to this place (~1060m):

From here, we went downhill, and the best view to the lake was this (at 938m):

When we arrived to Rhodannenberg (862m, which was basically a restaurant at the lakeshore), I took some photos of the lake and after that we got something to drink and rested a little:

From this point, we took the easy way: took the bus back to the car, then headed home.

I am slightly disappointed about the weather we had: it was all cloudy, no blue sky, so the photos were not that good that I expected. The two HDR photos which I made during the trip were OK, but that's all.

The hiking performance was not so bad: 600m up, 200m down, 3.5h including some rest too, so I was very satisfied regarding this!

If you want to enjoy the slideshow of the whole trip, just click here:

Quinten, part 2

Ok, now I have a little more time to tell the story of our Quinten trip.

Last year we had a trip to Quinten, but at 1/3 of the route, it started raining very heavily, so we had to turn back.

A few weeks ago my friends also started a trip to Quinten, but they also turned back because of the rain.

After these two incidents, this hiking destination seems to be unreachable and unconquestable.

The main important things about Quinten (from Wikipedia):

Quinten is an idyllic hamlet situated on the north shore of the Walensee in Switzerland. It belongs to the municipality of Quarten. As there are no roads leading to Quinten it is only reachable by boat or on foot.

According to this source, Quinten has only 41 inhabitants.

The plan was to go to Weesen with car, go to Quinten on foot, take the ship to Murg, go back to Weesen with train, and then go home. It was part of the plan not to departure early, since the best photos can be taken in the dusk.

That was enough for background, the photos themselves will tell the rest of the story, so click on the photo to continue:

Quinten, part 1

On the last weekend, we went to Quinten. It was a very interesting hike, it was not too difficult, but the rain and the scheduling made it slightly more complicated than we thought originally. :)

I don't want to tell the whole story now, I just uploaded a few photos to flickr from the tour.

The first photo was taken in Weesen, next to the train station, we left the car there. The weather was totally beautiful. I am very happy about my Manfrotto 725b tripod, I could close the aperture (f/14) and make the landscapes sharp. Note, that this shot is not HDR:

On the way, we've encountered a few tunnels, and the lights inside was really nice, so we decided to play with them. Here is Andi frozen for 1 sec. The lighting is entirely natural, it came from a hole in the side of the tunnel. (I forgot to remove the polar-filter, aaaargh):

Going further, when the road narrowed and we left the houses behind us, we've found a nice creek crossing our way. In this situation, the wide-angle lens was very handy:

Going just a few meters away, we've found a small waterfall. It was pretty dark here, so I could not do anything without the tripod. I think these long-exposure shots happens to be pretty good:

The wide angle version:

That's all for now, this was just a teaser. Stay tuned for the second part. :)

Bon Jovi: It's my life - performed by Googlers

I've got a mail in the company from Tamas about a song that they performed recently, and I acutally loved it very much. I asked him if I can publish the song, and he said OK for that, so I added a few photos of mine to it, and created a photo slideshow.

I struggled with the latest iMovie for hours (that's a looong story), but finally I managed to make it ready.

I especially like the intro part. Let me know how you like it:

Ticino journey

I had a few photos and stories (Swiss Miniatures part 1, part 2, Group Shot in Melide and Self-self-self-mirror portrait) already posted about our journey in Ticino, but I still have some other to tell about that journey, since the weather was very nice, hot and humid, and it was really exciting to travel around beautiful mountains.

I uploaded the photos to Picasa, wrote some stories to the photos, and you can even see them on a map.

Just click on the slideshow to see to the photos:

Self-self-self mirror portrait

Many of my friends has self-mirror portraits. I am not really into this, but when I saw the mirror in our room in Melide, I was totally fell in love with it. I immediately decided to do a "self-self-self mirror portrait":

The bathroom was very small, this mirror was in the middle. I put one flash (580 EX II) on the top of the mirror with a LumiQuest Softbox III as the main light, it was directed to my face and the camera. I think it was set to 1/32 power or something like that. I had my other two flashes (an 580 EX II and a 430 EX II) on the floor pointing upwards to the ceiling set to 1/64 power on my both sides. The lamp above the mirror gave just enough light to be able to focus with the camera, but other than that it was totally dark in the room. The triggering was done with the Cactus V4s, though I think infra would work, too. (In a small space, infra can bounce from the walls, and there is a big chance to hit the destination. Unfortunately outside it did not work for me).

Besides being dark and having hard time focusing, I had to bend when I did the shot, so that was very tiring. I was not really satisfied with the sharpness of the image, so later I even tried some shots with a tripod. Those photos were sharper, but I finally chose one for posting from the earlier ones. I had only a limited time for this experient, since it was pretty late, and next day we had to wake up early for the Swiss Miniatures (see here and here).

Group shot in Melide

Actually this was the first time I tried the Cactus V4s. We were very happy about a packed day with travel through the St. Gotthard tunnel, visiting Locarno, and a short walk in Melide, and we sat down in the garden of a the restaurant to eat something.

I brought two flashes with me (580 EX II), plus two triggers. I don't usually go to restaurant with full set of umbrellas and lightning equipment, so I needed to take a photo with this set, and since I had to wait a little bit for the food, I started to play with putting the flashes to different positions, and see what comes out.

After about 15 minutes of playing with the shooting angle and the adjustment of the flashes, this was the final photo:

The first flash was put just in front of the camera in the bench, hidden by the back of the bench, pointed directly to the group. The other flash was behind the second person on the right side, pointed to the roof, to give some fill from the top and some backlight also. I don't really remember the settings, but I think the front-flash was set up to the widest possible and about 1/4, and the back was set up to 1/2 and the narrowest possible.

I did not have any problems with the triggers, they did their job very well even when the flashes were not visible form the camera. Maybe that's because the flashes was not too far (2 and 4 meters), very much inside the 30 meter range, which was in the specification documentation of the transmitter.

Thank you for my friends to be so patient. :)

Swiss miniatures take 2

I thought that the Swiss Miniatures worth more than just a few photos, so I uploaded all what I made (removing duplicates). This place is really worth visiting, amazing how many things they made in a miniature form:

On this weekend: Swiss miniatures

This weekend was pretty busy: Melide, Locarno, Lugano, and two times 6 hours in the car when we travelled from and to Zürich.

The scenery was beautiful during the road, and both Locarno and Lugano was beautiful. But I'm not going to write about them right now, because I wanted to start my favourite part: Swiss Miniatures!

There is a park, located in Melide, which hosts a lot of miniatures of Swiss castles, typical building, etc. If you want, you can just run through the park, and you can finish in 30-40 minutes, but it is more fun watching the details of the buldings, the funny schedule of the trains (which seems to be also authentic) and the programmed movement of the ski elevators. So one can spend many hours in the park. For a photographer, it is a paradise, so many details, so many interesting thing to capture.

We were there during the hottest hours in a very hot day, so the shadows was pretty strong, it is not really a good time to take photographs, but I could not help it, there were no sign of any cloud approaching. So it is a bad luck if you want to really take good photos. but anyway, I tried my best, and there are a few good ones.

As you can see in the photos, I loved the small details of a model:

Trains were also very nice:

And some miniatures about huts in Valais:

More photos probably will come from the weekend later, when I get some little rest. :)

First entry

Hello Everyone!

This is actually the continuation of my blog from www.dlux.hu. I had three different blogs there:

• a personal,
• a tech,
• and a hungarian one (yes, the other two was in English).

I decided to combine them into one, and I'll use different tags for the posts, so if you are interested in different topics, you can subscribe only to the one you want. I'll use the following tags:

• photography: Topics related to photography.
• tech: Topics related to technology.
• journey: Journey-related stuff.
• life: Things related to life in general.
• ... (we will see :) )
  

I hope I'll have some more time than in the previous year to post things here.

Enjoy!

Balázs

Edit: removed hungarian and english tags, I probably won't use them.

Edit2: Added hungarian, english back, and added journey and life.