Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

(This is the second post about my trip to Athens. Part 1 is here.)

My first stop in Athens was the Acropolis. Before my trip, I’d dreamed of visiting the Parthenon for well over a decade. My family doctor grew up in Athens, and her descriptions of growing up in the shadows of history planted the initial seed. Photos and paintings in my art history class in college sealed the deal.

When I finally made it this February, I was in awe of being present at the “original” building. Echoes of the Parthenon are everywhere in Western society. Nearly every bank built prior to the 1950s owes at least some of its architectural structure to the Athenian ideals, as do many government buildings and museums. Standing in front of the Parthenon, you realize that somebody had to invent the style, even if it is quite old. Furthermore, the the Athenian society that built the Parthenon gave us much more than architecture. I greatly appreciate the right to vote for my leaders, even if the choices may not always be that attractive.

The Acropolis dominates the Athenian skyline, which is convenient in such a walkable city. It is hard to get lost when you have such a handy reference point.

Many travelers think of jet lag as mainly a curse. In a magnificent city like Athens, I consider jet lag to be partly a benefit. Waking up before dawn gives you a chance to explore a quiet city and photograph during the magical light of sunrise. (I did find that when I would leave my hotel at 5:30 am, there were often crowds of clubbers heading home. Athenian streets were much quieter around 6 am.) Arising early also helps beat the crowds. I arrived at the Acropolis when it opened, and until around 9:15 in the morning, there were less than a dozen tourists exploring the site.

The entry to the Acropolis is through a massive gate, seen here early in the day in a waxing sun:

Naturally, most people who visit the Acropolis do so to see the Parthenon. I have many pictures of the Parthenon, but I think this is my favorite, showing the gleaming marble against the blue sky:

It is not obvious from the picture of the south face just how busy the site is. Even early in the morning, the top of the Acropolis was a busy work site. My contemplative walk was punctuated by the sound of hammers, chisels, cranes, and diamond-tipped saws cutting marble blocks for the immense restoration efforts. At the entrance, the Temple of Athena Nike is being completely restored stone by stone and is now only really appreciated as a sign.

Restoration work is proceeding on the Parthenon itself. Columns are being carefully and painstakingly reconstructed. Missing parts of the columns are being carved to fit with the existing remnants. Most of the work is taking place on the north face. This photo shows the scaffholding supporting the restoration. The lighter colored marble in the columns is the marble that has been carved to complete the column blocks. The tight fit of the restoration pieces is clearly shown by the pieces in the foreground.

My previous experience with photographs did not prepare me for finding a building I liked better than the Parthenon on the Acropolis. I was captivated by the Erechtheion, a temple dedicated to Athena, Poseidon, and Erechthus and the other deities of Athens. Pictures I’ve seen focus on the “porch” structure held up by the Caryatids, but rarely put it in context with the rest of the Erechtheion.

In conjunction with the restoration work on the structures of the Parthenon itself, the New Acropolis Museum is taking shape at base of the Acropolis, replacing a much older museum on the summit. At ten times the size of the old museum, I expect that the New Acropolis Museum will provide a far better environment for exhibiting artifacts and telling the story of the Acropolis. Although it is scheduled to open in 2008, the new museum is open for a few hours every day. Strikingly, it is built on a historical site that is actively being excavated. Glass floors allow museum visitors to look down and see an active archaeological site. In this somewhat self-referential photo, I’m looking down through the floor into the work site.

Tourists are not allowed inside any of the temples, which is not particularly surprising. I had expected they would be restricted to prevent them from being loved to death. Ongoing restoration and construction work is also an ever-present danger. Restoration workers were constantly going in and out, and several large cranes were operating throughout most of my half-day visit.

As I wandered around the site, I tried to imagine what it must be like to be working on the Acropolis. It is one of the foremost historical sites of Western civilization, and a towering monument to Greek culture. For an American, the closest comparison I can think of would be the restoration of the Statue of Liberty in the 1980s.

I was recently on a business trip in Europe on which I was unfortunately stuck using London as one of my main air travel focal points. On the trip, I used three of London’s five main airports (Heathrow, Stansted, and London City); I have now used four of the five airports. The exception is Luton, and my British colleagues tell me that I am not missing anything.

With a weekend day to spare, I decided to use the London Walks guide to occupy my day. Every walking tour I have taken with London Walks has shown me small hidden spots in London, sometimes right under my nose. My Kensington experiences have been negative, confined to the overcrowded and high street dominated by chain stores. As a former British colleague of mine explained once, \"When we talk about having more money than sense, Kensington is one of the first places that springs to mind.\" To attempt to crack the shell of the bland corporate veneer, I decided on the Old Kensington walk.

David, our guide for the walk, is surprisingly, the son of a Wisconsin farmer. When I mentioned that I had attended Grinnell College, he asked if I was still a student. Oh, David, flattery will get you everywhere! (I graduated almost eleven years ago. While I’d like to believe I still look 20, my chosen discipline of engineering really demands that I accept reality.)

The highlights of the walk:

David explained that the people who maintained streetlights or cleaned chimneys (my memory fails me) were also responsible for waking up household residents by using a long pole to knock on their windows. This activity is the origin of the phrase “knocked up,” which apparently in British English has merely the unpleasant connotation of a wake-up call and has nothing to do with the American English connotation.

As we stood on Thackeray Street, David asked us to consider the types of shops (hairdressers and high-end clothiers), and told us to consider the “sheer social muzzle velocity” of the neighborhood, which is distinctly plutocratic. An unimproved 17th or 18th century home sold in the neighborhood recently for ₤1.5 million. Social muzzle velocity is a most excellent phrase that I shall endeavor to use more frequently.

In Kensington Church Walk, we stopped in front of Annie Russell’s hair salon. “How gifted is Annie Russell?” asked David rhetorically, before answering that “she is talented enough to be Elizabeth Taylor’s hairdresser for twelve years.”

Also on Kensington Church Walk, there is a famous low wall, shown in the photos below. The late Princess of Wales lived in the neighborhood, and both William and Harry amused themselves walking on the wall. (During the course of the tour and taking the photographs below, I think a half-dozen children came to walk on the wall.) One resident of the building behind the wall dislikes this practice, and has instigated the planting of unpleasant plants along the wall to discourage children from walking on it. David is opposed to this idea, and partway through the tour, he saw a neighborhood resident and said, “I’ve got the metaphor: barbed wire wall!”

St. Mary Abbots church is a short walk from the tube station. To enter the church from the high street, you walk through a small cloister:

Two of the windows on the St. Mary Abbots chapel are labeled with the “ancient lights” sign seen in the photo below. England has an old law that says owners with unobstructed light can protect the level of light received through a window light by putting up a sign like the one below. New developments cannot block light through the windows. The legal doctrine of the right to illumination has not been adopted in the United States as a general principle, but some narrow exceptions do exist, mainly for solar energy. For example, the California Solar Shade Control Act protects investments in rooftop solar panels by ensuring that they retain unobstructed access to the sun. In England, the legal doctrine goes back to the days when sunlight was precious. Windows which have had continuous access to light for 20 years can advertise the fact with a sign reading “ancient lights,” which then protects the sunlight on the window against future obstructions.

Our tour ended near Kensington Palace. In the days when it was a working palace, the building in the photo below was used as barracks for the royal guards unit. It has now been converted into flats. On a previous tour, one of David’s customers had visited one of the exclusive flats. They are small, with no closets (17th century soldiers didn’t need much storage space). At the time of the report, the flats rented for ₤10,000 per week, which is about $87,000 per month at current exchange rates. For the price, you do get some cachet. As part of the palace grounds, the landlord is the Crown. The building itself is pretty nondescript:

Higher class accomodations in Kensington have period details, like this old-style bell pull to announce yourself at the door, rather than the modern doorbell buttons we are now generally accustomed to:

As the tour group broke up, David jokingly described London Walks as “a social security program for unemployed actors.” It shows. Most of the London Walks guides have impeccable timing, flawless delivery, sly humor, and have big voices that easily carry out to the edges of large groups. Combine this with all the knowledge about the hidden back streets, and London Walks is living proof of Dr. Johnson’s famous maxim that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

In February of this year, I was in Athens for an IEEE ad hoc meeting. I have wanted to visit Athens for well more than a decade, and it was worth the wait. In a way, I’m glad that I made the trip after I bought a good camera and had some time to get used to it because I got much better results than if I were learning the camera on the trip.

Naturally, getting to Athens was not without a hitch, since I was transferring at one of the world’s worst airports, London Heathrow. (It could, however, be worse.) When I checked in, I received boarding passes for all three segments of my trip. After arriving in London, I checked the monitors, and found out that the London-Athens flight had been cancelled. Upon checking with customer service at the airline, I was told that the flight had been cancelled because of a snowstorm that had shut down the Athens airport.

My arrival in Athens was delayed by a day. By the time I arrived, the snow was melting quite rapidly, though I did get a few pictures of this unusual occurrence.

First stop, the Acropolis. Really, is there an alternative? At the foot of the Acropolis, approaching from the south, there was snow by the curb of the street, with the sun shining brightly on the Parthenon above:

Getting closer, you could peek through the gates of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, where some of the stones were still covered with a thin layer of snow:

When walking around, I felt an unexpectedly dumbstruck trying to read signs. Unlike, say, China or Japan, where I don’t expect to read anything except the Romanization on the street signs, I do know the Greek alphabet well enough to try reading the larger Greek signs most of the time. (I know the Greek alphabet from studying physics, not the language.) On-the-fly transliteration helped only to the extent that the word was close to a form that had been adopted into English directly, or words that were adopted in English through an intermediate language like Latin. It is hard to describe the feeling I got when I started to look for the “Εξοδος” on an exit sign rather than the “exit,” or when I realized the derivation of “agoraphobia” while looking at the open space of the Ancient Agora:

There is also a much smaller agora built by the Romans, also built around a central courtyard:

As I sort through pictures from the trip, I’ll be posting the best ones.

January’s IEEE 802.11 working group meeting was held in Taipei. Towards the end of my time in Taipei, I wandered through the grounds of the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. In a small area with a statue of Dr. Sun, there was a neat view of Taipei 101, shrouded in the heavy wet fog around the city at the time.

One of my favorite things to do with my camera is just to go wandering. On my January trip to Hong Kong, I stumbled across the Graham Street Market, which is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) in Hong Kong. Out of everything I saw, there were two scenes that particularly struck me.

The first was at a seafood shop. As typical for the Guangdong region, much of what’s on sale is alive and kept in polystyrene water containers. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the aeration tubes. What really struck me about the photo, though, is the smile on the face of the woman helping a customer.

(As an aside, one of the reasons why I was shooting in black and white is because it doesn’t require me to color balance. Street market vendors use all kinds of lights, each of which has a slightly different color cast. Tungsten lamps are orange, fluorescent lamps have a sickly greenish cast, and the energy-efficient metal halide lamps that light streets the world over spread a yellowish light. Provided there is enough contrast, switching to black-and-white means that I don’t need to deal with the horrid color clash from all the lighting.)

The second scene, which I didn’t capture as well as I would have liked, illustrates the captivity of traffic to pedestrians. Only a small fraction of Hong Kong residents own cars because the government taxes automobiles very heavily and the transit system is possibly the best in the world. The street market is actually a street. As I wandered around, I noticed that trucks were making deliveries, but they sometimes had to move very slowly through single-lane streets that were choked with pedestrian traffic. At one point, I noticed a car moving slowly through the pedestrian crowd. It wasn’t just any car, either. I love the contrast of the immaculately polished white Bentley moving through a crowd of pedestrians.

In January, the IEEE 802.11 working group met in Taipei. The week before, I hosted a meeting for Task Group U in Hong Kong, a city that everybody should visit for its unique blend of traditional Chinese and Western culture.

I’ve been going to Hong Kong for over 15 years, though there was a gap of more than ten years between my first and second visits. In that time, one of the most notable changes is an unfortunate side effect of the rapid economic development in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and the entire Pearl River Delta region. Air pollution has become much more prevalent, to the point where it can often be hard to see across the beautiful harbor.

After the meeting one night, I took one of the Star Ferry’s Harbour Cruises with some of my fellow attendees. As we passed by the Central district, I noticed flashes of light coming from up high on Victoria Peak. At this point, I am so accustomed to the seemingly permanent haze that it took me a while to realize that the flashes were tourist cameras going off on the peak.

As the boat docked, I debated whether to head to the peak at 10 pm, since I was quite tired. My companions provided the needed encouragement, and I’m glad I went. By the time I made it up, many of the buildings had turned off their colorful night lights but it was still the best view I’ve ever had of the harbor:

I later spoke with my colleagues who live in Hong Kong, and they told me that a night so clear almost never happens. I feel very fortunate that I happened to be in the city at the time.

I was in Helsinki for an IEEE ad hoc meeting recently. On my last night in Helsinki, I went out for a walk after night, and took this picture of the statue of Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, the first President of Finland, in front of the Eduskuntatalo (house of the Finnish Parliament).

What I found remarkable about the experience is that the statue is only the width of a driveway across from the front steps of the building. I pulled out my tripod and proceeded to fiddle with my camera to set everything up. Nobody approached me and told me that photography was forbidden, or that mysterious security rules dictated that I move along, even though I was only a few meters from the entrance to the building. The parliament may not have been in session, but I can’t imagine that I’d be allowed to set up my tripod anywhere I wanted to on the U.S. Capitol grounds.

More photos from Helsinki are in the Helsinki gallery here.

Like most people I know, I own way too many battery-powered electronic devices. My photography habit is only making the matter worse, since I have a ton of equipment that is powered by AA batteries. Many pros will use nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries because their high capacity and low internal resistance are good characteristics for many photography applications, most notably, powering flash units.

The trouble with NiMH batteries is that they self-discharge rapidly, about 1-2% per day. If you charge up a set and leave them alone for a month, they’ll be almost flat. Photo pros don’t have a problem with this, since many of them shoot in high enough volumes that it’s not a big inconvenience to keep charging them since their usage runs way ahead of the self-discharge.

For the rest of us photographers, it is a major annoyance. It also prevents batteries from being used in some attractive applications, like remote controls. Remotes don’t draw a lot of power, but the self-discharge will make rechargeables run flat far too quickly to be used.

Fortunately, Sanyo may have come to the rescue with their new eneloop batteries. They’re lower capacity than most NiMH batteries, but Sanyo claims they don’t self-discharge. I haven’t done any quantitative testing, but my personal experience so far is that the claim is not completely farfetched. I bought a set of AAs and popped them into my flash on July 19. I’m still shooting with them, so even a month after installation they still have something.

(Sanyo claims that they retain 90% of their charge after 6 months, 85% after a year, and 70% at two years, but I have not attempted to verify those figures. Sanyo ships them charged and says they can be used immediately on receipt, which certainly is true.)

The next qualitative test is with the set of AAAs that arrived on Friday. On Sunday the 19th, I installed them into my Logitech Harmony remote. I’ll report back when I need to recharge them.

Earlier this year, it seemed to me as if I needed a circular polarizer for daytime shots. Last week at the 69th IETF meeting in Chicago, I think I proved myself right. Here are two photos of the Aon Center (I’m old enough that it will always be the “Standard Oil Building”) taken seconds apart. The shot on the right used a polarizer, and the reward is a deeper blue in the sky.

(Yeah, I know that neither of the two photos are well-composed. However, the couplet is the best illustration from all the photos that I took because the angle of the shot relative to the sun was in the best possible position for maximum effect of the polarizer.)

Tonight (actually, I’m posting this early enough that it’s probably “last night” by now), Michael Williams put on an awesome get-together. In addition to some great Indian food, Michael and his wife organized a belly dancing show for us.

Yes, belly dancing. Here’s one of the better photos from the night, with a slow enough shutter speed to show off the action (and some post-processing to punch up the contrast):

The restaurant was a challenging shooting environment because the ambient light level was so low that a lot of the photos came out grainy. Even at ISO 1600, the ambient light required 1/8 - 1/15 second exposures. I tried using the camera’s built-in flash with a index card jury-rigged into a bounce card. A couple of times, it even worked really well, as with this shot of Frédérique with her back to the camera. With the flash, I was able to cut the shutter speed to 1/40 second, and freeze a wonderfully radiant smile:

The full gallery from the night is here. (You should also check out a couple of fun clean-up photos: the first dancer pictured above balanced a speaker stand on her head, even when the phone rang.)