Year: 2009

Leading the cheerleaders

Given a parade with a pack of cheerleaders in front… of course you must have in fron of them the leader of the cheerleaders, right?

cheerleader

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You are going to jail

One of the events taking place at the Bucharest Days was the high school students march, with thousands of kids from Bucharest. I searched for my colleagues but no luck… I guess they were smart enough to take place in what effectively was the launch of Oprescu’s campaign launch for presidency. Good things guys!

march

But the thing which clearly stood out in the march was the high concentration of lolita’s on sqare meter, which was…. uhm… unhealthy

march

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Bucharest Days

A round anniversary of your city, like 550 years for Bucharest, is pretty much a one in a lifetime event, so you must take advantage of it at your best.

Unfortunately I am moody and when in a bad mood I have the tendency to screw things up and miss opportunities: so Saturday the water was ugly, grey clouds and imminence of rain, I was tired, those resonated in a bad way, my mood got increasingly negative, I felt like everything goes against me and the photography suffered. Sunday was a bit better, but the day was shorted in events.

However, I will try a few posts highlighting a few moments. Update: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

bucharest panorama
depressing grey sky, just like my soul

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Bucharest Days – prelude

This weekend is supposed to be the peak for the 550 anniversary of “Bucharest Days” and I plan to be there and take photos, still the weather will have the final word: the forecast for Sunday, the most important day, with fireworks and stuff is supposed to be rainy (showers, probability 60%) and Sunday is expected to be good.

flags

The shooting opportunities must be plenty, as attested by this preview from last week-end when the festivities began

city girls

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Gypsies

After the big pop star Madonna was booed at a concert in Bucharest for giving an uniformed lecture about gipsies. Of course that created a cascade of equally uninformed reactions in the media all over the world and a storm of comments. But like any storms, it came and went away, people forgot about it.

Well, last week-end at ONGFest, the national festival for non-governmental organizations was a good opportunity for me to remember the Madonna incident: the most acclaimed artistic moment at the event (at least from what I have seen) was created by a gypsy organization, they danced, sang and people loved them. Yes, the same people who would have booed Madonna.

gypsy dance

What’s the trick? They were bathed, wearing clean clothes, smelled good, had jobs, acted like people who attended school and their music was authentic, not manele. Is that too demanding?

Anyway, I enjoyed the moment and took a lot of photos.

At the end of their show, they started a “penguin dance” and everybody joined them. Is that racism? discrimination?

gypsy dance

With this being said, I will reiterate: I have no sympathy for the smelly and dirty ones who refuse to get a job and instead send their children to beg and steal for them, milk the social security and use the school only as a source of food (the “corn cu lapte” program).

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…sword in hand…

I am a big sucker for swords and fantasy, no from my point of view, the swords tournament offered by the knights from Țara Bârsei was the highlight of the ONGFest. Too bad I didn’t know about it, I did’n plan shooting it, didn’t expect to say so late in the night so I didn’t have an external flash unit on me, didn’t have a secondary battery for the camera on me and as a result the photos were not the best and not as many as I would have liked. And I missed their following fireworks.

knights

Beyond the scenario, the fight was spectacular, they were putting passion into it: sparks on clashing swords, real kick throwing the opponent 2-3 meters away and making it roll in the dirt, all the audience enjoyed it.

sword fight

And where are knights and sword fight, there must be also princesses, balancing the male violence with their grace and providing the guys with a reason to fight. And maybe a prize, what I know?

princesses

So the old city of Bucharest, knights, swordplay, princesses… what do you want more? Oh, yeah, some drinks… they had that too 😀

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Work complete

[Y!M]In a large effort taking a few weeks I had to repair the missing images on this photoblog
after the massive data loss caused by the yahoo bastard. A few photos were lost for good, but the majority of content is restored properly.

Now I can focus on finding an alternate gallery solution (self hosted, I won’t trust something else after getting burned) and taking more photos.

Eat my dust Yahoo… I said it before and will say it again: I hope you get cancer and die. You deserve it.


Moustache

I found this guy figure interesting enough for a portrait and he was cooperative, giving me (I think) an portrait-worthy look.

moustache

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That ambulance! Chase it!

No, I didn’t became (yet) an ambulance chaser, it is just a demo for the rescue team (“crucea rosie”) intervention, simulating the intervention after the explosion of a gas pipe.

rescue

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Free Hugs / Fairies

So, as promised, a series of photos from ONGFest and Bucharest Days, what is the best start for it? How about some free hugs by the “Bucegi Mountains fairies”? Pretty neat, no matter how you stretch the definition of a “fairy” and to whom you apply it. And you must be content with what you get, right?

free hugs/fairies

note: “îmbrățișări gratuite” = “free hugs” but it can also stand for “gratuitous hugs”

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The “beautiful” city of Bucharest is almost 550 years old

I am undergoing a big operation of repairing my blog, these days it looks pretty much like the photo below: after the yahoo bastards closed my flickr account I have to manually fix all the articles (I am close, stepped into July 2009).

But the city is much worse, see how the old city (Lipscani street) looks one week before the 550 anniversary of its written acknowledgement by Vlad Țepeș (AKA The Impaler, AKA Dracula), no chance in hell it will be ready in one week for the event:

lipscani

My initial plan was to post photos again only after the blog is fixed and I have a gallery solution, but I can’t sit on a ton of photos waiting, will take a small vacation for fixing and post a few images from Bucharest Days and ONGFest.

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To beer or not to beer

Even if for the moment I don’t have a place to host my photos (the long process of repairing this blog is ongoing, will take some more days) I still shoot when I get the opportunity, hoping will post when everything is settled.

So when I saw the big media splash about the Tuborg event held with free entrance in the Izvor Park, I figured it may be a good opportunity for some photos, even if I was not interested much in the music or their beer (like 10 years ago it was probably my beer of choice, now it tastes like the recipe was changed for the worse).

At the entrance a big poster informed you are not allowed with professional photo/video cameras, with food or drinks brought from outside, not even with you own plastic glasses. And a number of agents performing body searches, to ensure you don’t have any of those on you.

Seeing that, my first reaction was to turn back and leave, but I though there is no harm in trying and approached the gate. I guy said: go there, the guy with black sunglasses will look at your camera and decide. OK, trip to the guy with sunglasses, who looked at my entry-level DLSR with zoom lenses mounted and decided: “this is semi-pro, you can’t go in”.

No point in arguing about what is “pro” and “semi-pro” or that the poster said only “pro”, there are a lot of other things to shoot.

And what about beers? My current favorites are imported Czech beers, the Tuborg products are like that: Skol – poor and cheap, a lot of alternatives in this area; Tuborg – worse than it used to be, you can get better at the same price; Carlsberg – this one is passable. Too bad they also the importer for Guinness, the other ones are not missed…


Those bastards!

For an unknown reason (I can only suspect my criticism for their deal with Microsoft) the guys at Yahoo deleted my flickr account. At first, I thought it was not such a big deal, since I was looking for an alternative anyway (I like flickr as a gallery but I don’t want to deal with Microsoft) and right after the account deletion the photos embedded in various web pages were still visible.

A few days later, those are gone… this photoblog is ruined, my other (main) blog has a few broken articles, a number of pages which used my photos under the CC-BY-SA license are broken as well.

For this blog, I probably have to dig into the photo archive, put the files on my static site and repair about 200 posts. A big and ugly work. For 3-rd party sites, I can’t to anything, as I have no idea who and how used the photos (that’s the reason of freedom).

Lesson learned: do not rely on external services for critical applications (ups! this blog is hosted also on a 3-rd party service, hopefully a more trustworthy one).

Yahoo, I hope you get cancer and die. You deserve it.


Fascination with water

We may be fascinated with fire, but it’s archenemy, the water, is also a fascination for us. Not that magic as the fire, but water is everywhere: waterfalls, clouds, sea waves, rain, fountains, snow, tears, ice…

[creel]

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Fascination with fire

I don’t know why, but certainly we, people, have a fascination with fire: we could stay for hours and look at the flames. It’s like magic.

[fire]

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