Originally posted on July 2, 2012 by Canicus
From Venice to Rome
Today was a transfer day from Venice to Naples. This time it was straight through from Venice to Rome with no transfers. I’m still trying to figure out why I had to transfer in Bologna on Friday. For some obscure reason, today I was assigned to a paired seat, while they broke up a family assigning on to a single seat. So we swapped. I did have to change trains at Rome Termini. It is supposed to be a 1 hour 10 minute ride to Naples. But for some reason (explained to us in Italian) we parked for an hour in a tunnel just south of Rome.
Before I left Venice I attempted to get cash from an ATM with my VISA debit card which was refused for international withdrawals. I sent panicked emails, one to a former colleague of mine who uses the same credit union, asking to get this straightened out before I had to resort to begging. After I got to Naples he sent email saying it had been fixed. So I located an ATM and successfully withdrew some Euros.
The eastern coast of Italy has a diverse ethnic history. Naples (Italian Napoli) is a Greek colony – Neopolis or “New City” – probably predating Rome. So is Herculaneum (named after Hercules) which I hope to visit tomorrow. Wednesday is Pompeii – and Etruscan city originally, subsequently Greek and Roman. Stabiae I think is Roman. Paestum is Greek.
I’ve owned five digital cameras. (I’ve forgotten how many film cameras going back to a Kodak Hawkeye when I was a kid. I do love the convenience of the digital cameras. No more 36 exposure rolls to wait to be developed, etc. Last year I lugged a Pentax K200D DSLR and five lenses around Rome. This year I brought a much smaller and lighter Canon PowerShot G12 instead. Both cameras can be operated as “point-and-shoot,” but have a lot of advanced features that handle special situations. One feature unique to the Canon is a setting to deal with settings with wild differences in light and dark. In Saturday’s slide show there is a shot of the Golden Staircase that illustrates this. The staircase is dark but at the top landing is a window, so I was shooting something dark, with that glaring bright window. The function does seem to tame the window and enhance the staircase – actually better than Photoshop would and certainly better than a darkroom guru in the film days. The problem with fixing the exposure afterward is that once something is underexposed (i.e., the dark parts) or overexposed (i.e. the bright parts) you really cannot recover the lost image.
Today I was experimenting with a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second to see if I could stop scenery flashing by the train window. It does work except for things very close to the train; there are settings up to 1/4000th of a second that may even do better. Another feature that is neat for taking pictures out of train windows is a setting that keeps taking pictures (a bit more than 1 per second) as long as I hold the shutter button down. I still may get a telephone pole, but I will also get shots just before and just after that darn telephone pole.
Unfortunately, the SDHC card’s directory for today got scrambled. I will be able to salvage the pictures, but not tonight. There wasn’t anything all that interesting.
Tomorrow I’ll try to get down to Herculaneum – with a new card in the camera. That should yield some interesting shots.
Useless statistics. On Saturday and Sunday I took 13,708 steps for a distance of 6.48 miles, burning 585 calories. I walked at an average speed of 2.9 mph, and walked 3 hours, 31 minutes and 51 seconds. Today I took only 2,685 steps for a distance of 1.27 miles, burning 114 calories. I walked a bit faster – 3.0 mph – in 24 minutes and 45 seconds. Obviously most of the day was spent sitting on trains or waiting for trains. I not ready for the Roman Legions obviously.
Canicus Modius