SCHUTZHAUS TIERSER ALPL – The hardest day in our trek. A long, long uphill slog from Schlern to this refugio in a high saddle. We sleep here in bunk bed accomodations and have a relatively simple meal – our only simple dinner of the entire trip. Well worth the effort. All images with my Leica Monochrom and 50mm Summicron Asph. lens.
On this day last year: Todi. Todi is actually our next stop (after the Dolomites) in this year’s trip.
VOLS AM SCHLERN AND ON THE TRAIL – After a leisurely breakfast we finally hit the trail. Al images taken with my Leica Monchrom camera and 50mm Sumilux Asph. lens.
Local scenery in Vols:
Our guide, Ken Fuhrer (yes, he really is our leader), of Walker Ryder in Teluride, which organized our trip.
Maria has her game face on:
Another couple at the refugio where we had lunch:
On this day last year: Wedding in Todi.
VÖLS AM SCHLERN ITALY – That’s right, the name of this Italian town has an umlaut. 94% of the population here speaks German as their first language. This is the starting point of our week-long trek in the Dolomites, the name of the major alpine range in Alte Adige area of Italy. The Dolomites are named after the white calcium magnesium carbonate stone that is characteristic of the peaks in this region. Dolomite stone takes it’s name from Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, a Frenchman who described the stone in the late 18th Century. We got here after a very long day of travel by air and train, and finally a local taxi from Bolzano, which is a close as you can get by rail. We arrived just in time for a sunset over the town. Taken with my Leica Monochrom and 50mm Summicron Asph. lens.
On this day one year ago: Deruta.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – A rushed day getting ourselves collected for our trekking trip to the Dolomites. I snapped a shot off with my iPhone on my way to Paragon to top up on some gear – rushing to get something before going into travel mode, because my work on travel days in uniformly terrible.
I’m actually posting this on July 25, more than two weeks after I took this image. i planned on traveling without a computer to save weight; the iPad that I’m traveling with doesn’t have quite enough horsepower to maintain this blog. On June 27 I actually posted my entry for June 17 and had written and warehoused posts for June 18 through June 27 so all I have to do with my iPad is actually publish a post out of the inventory on a roughly daily basis. As I write this on July 15 I’m back at my computer scrambling to write the posts from my time in Italy.
Here’w the June 27 iPhone shot:
On this day one year ago: Swiss cheese on the hoof
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I spent the morning working from home and getting myself sorted for our trip to Italy tomorrow. Photographically I used the quiet time to test my new Leica 50mm Summicron asph lens. We know that it’s very sharp at all f-stops shooting distant subjects. I confirmed that with some shots out my window which I haven’t posted because the difference doesn’t show up at web resolution. Around the apartment I shot a bunch of subjects close and wide open, test the character of the lens’s rendering of the out of focus background, the so-called “bokeh” of the lens. It turns out that the bokeh is neutral and rather pleasing (this is sometimes not the case with highly corrected lenses(. Here’s an example taken with my Leica M:
On this day last year:in the clouds in Switzerland.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – This morning I spotted an Escher structure with my Leica Monochrom and 50mm Summicron Asph lens.
On this day last year: On the trail to Sils Maria.
NEW YORK – A new lens arrived today: a Leica 50mm Summicron Asph. Leica announced this lens last year. It’s specs are daunting: it is diffraction limited at f4.0 and nearly so at f2.0 and f2.8 across the full 35mm sized frame. “Diffraction limited” means that it has the highest resolution permitted under the laws of physics. It’s also tiny, about the same size as my Leica 50mm Summicron.
Here’s an image with it from today taken outside our office. I’ll be using this lens a lot over the next month. “Induro” is evidently a new restaurant – I think of Induro as a brand of high end carbon fiber tripods.
On this day last year: Photo shoot.
