Wanderer Photography

I know it’s been a while, but here we go again… I am taking a break from the last summer story for some sort of “Breaking news”. I have just visited a salt mine close to Bucharest: Slanic Salt Mine.

Buried a bit more than 200m into the ground, the salt mine makes up for a cool nuclear apocalypse hiding place, especially since it’s accessible by car from Bucharest in less than 2 hours. The salt mine has not actually been a salt mine any more for 43 years. The salt mine named Unirea (Unification) has been in full use between 1938 and 1970. The salt mining was done in a top-down manner, starting at about 170m from ground level and then the mining kept slicing the ground underneath (2.2m tall slices). In 1970, the (pure) salt ran out, so the mine was converted in a touristic attraction.

The first impression once you get there, past the usually long queue on the weekends, is the elevator. The elevator was built around 1970 and it’s the only way to get in and out of the mine (at least that is what the posters say). There are more exits from the mine through which the salt was being carried to the surface, but those are now locked and in a very bad state. Back to the elevator, based on my experience with it, it’s the kind of place where you can expect a screw to malfunction and take your life. The descent to the bottom of the mine (205 meters) takes about 90 seconds and on the way to the bottom, there are 2 exits from the elevator shaft (besides top and bottom): 1) there is a hall where there is no air draft. This hall is used for international contests of Indoor Model Aircraft Flying and is not accessible to the public. 2) the other exit is at the top of the halls that tourists can visit. This is used by the employees to check if there are any leaks or dangers of the ceiling falling on tourists (shit happens!). This is also not accessible to the public.

Once inside, everything is different. You are 205 meters under ground in a hall that is 50 meters high. Needless to say you feel tiny and the view is breathtaking. For the breathtaking part, the “weather” doesn’t help either. Regardless of the conditions outside, the temperature in the mine is constant at 12C (50-55F) and the air pressure also stable at 730mm Hg. The humidity in the air is the only one affected by the outside world, with it being usually 10% less than outside.

So what madness drives people here? Not much, just the ability to stay in a salt-concentrated environment and breathe that air. The salt in the air is a natural remedy for some respiratory problems and there are people that actually come and sleep here during the day. What else besides sleeping? Walking for one – it takes about 30 – 45 minutes to do a roundtrip of the mine, but they have some extra activities. There are some bikes, basketball hoops, a small football court, table tennis tables and, of course, many walls against which you can train in tennis, volleyball etc.

There are a couple of lakes inside produced by infiltrated water, but not deep enough to feature gondola rides. In general, people come here for the experience of being in a salt mine and for the clean, salty air.

If you are a visitor, worth noting are some salt sculptures of Decebalus (picture below), a king of Dacians who fought the Roman Empire, and Trajan (who also has a sculpture in the mine), emperor of Romans who fought against Decebalus. Just nearby is the sculpture of Mihai Eminescu, one of the top Romanian writers.

Once you’re done taking salt air into your lungs, it’s time queue again for the elevator up (times for the elevator are every day except Monday 9AM – 3:45PM). If you are around, make sure you visit what’s left of the Salt Mountain and (what’s left of) Bride’s Cave, both in the city of Slanic.

Over and out,
/cd

Hello, World!

After a couple of days in which I enjoyed the privileges of having my parents around – read: dinner prepared, waiting for me, everyday after coming from work, breakfast prepared in the morning, we decided to head out on one week-end around Washington state.

First stop: Snoqualmie Falls. Even though it was end of June – beginning of July, the weather managed to upset us a bit – it rained for a couple of days in a row. Nothing unexpected, but the weather was pretty bad for a day trip. Nevertheless, a day trip where you can see stuff is a lot better than staying at home.

Snoqualmie Falls is located in the city of Snoqualmie, about 30 minutes by car from Bellevue via I-90. The falls is spectacular, with a height of 80 meters. But, the more interesting thing about this falls (at least from an engineering perspective), can not be seen in the pictures: at the base of the falls is the first completely underground power plant. This power plant, built in 1898, is dug into the ground at 82 meters (the height of the falls) and has been featured in the Twin Peaks TV series. The power plant is still operational (it was actually extended and there are 2 power plants now) and they are “responsible” for the low debit of water that actually reaches the falls (even on rainy days).

Another touristic attraction for the city of Snoqualmie is the Northwest Railway Museum which has a train that runs on the route: Snoqualmie – North Bend – Snoqualmie – Snoqualmie Falls – Snoqualmie (the start point – Snoqualmie – is half-way between Snoqualmie Falls and North Bend). The train trip was very … bumpy, let’s say. It was slow and bumpy up to the point that I was actually wondering if this train passed the space-time continuum and came straight from my childhood in Romania when it took 3-4 hours for a 60km trip from home (Bucharest) to my grandparent’s city (Oltenita). But enough with complaining – the carriages were very old and tried to reproduce as much as possible the atmosphere of using them. For example, the one below was from a train from the beginning of the 20th century and at the very end of the carriage, there was a barber seat. Honestly, if the quality of the tracks was the same then as it is now, you really really REALLY had to trust your barber to shave off only hair and not skin. The train offers an interesting view of Snoqualmie Falls (from the top), as well as a view of the Snoqualmie river.

Even though it was not the brightest of days, I decided to continue the journey with my parents to the city of Leavenworth. Leavenworth is a very small city (2000 inhabitants) in Washington state on the Wenatchee river and it has one special characteristic: the entire city is modeled to look like a Bavarian city. After living in Germany for 5 years, this feels a bit like going back in time. Herzlich Wilkommen, indeed!

They even have a nutcracker museum (not that big, but the old lady will tell you about her and her husband and how they came to the US).
It’s a nice city where you can have some real German Wurst and some good German beer. There isn’t a lot of stuff to do around here, but to just sit back, relax, have some good food and beer.

The road back was on a Sunday evening on US-2. Unfortunately, there was a 30 km traffic jam since everybody was going home to Seattle, but at least we got to experience the size of a traffic jam in the US.

Over and out,

/cd

It’s been a while since I last wrote here… and for a good reason: for the past couple of weeks, I had some guests – my parents, coming to visit me and their first time in the US. Therefore, my bed was “invaded” (I actually offered to sleep on the couch), my kitchen and in general my life – I don’t complain though, my parents’ cooking skills are amazing and it was all for a good purpose. It had been a while since I last saw them (6 months) and it was their first time to see where I am and what has become of me out of their influence, 16 hours by plane and 10 time-zones away from them.

Since my vacation days are numbered and wanted to make the most of my parents’ time here, I decided to take some trips with them and experience the US. First, we went to Hawaii (Kona on the Big Island). I had been there before, but that place is so amazing it deserved another visit from me. On our way back (via San Francisco), we decided to skip the last leg of the trip back to Seattle and take a short 3-day trip to Las Vegas (actually, Vegas was only about 24 hours, more on that later) and only after that come back to Seattle (some of us have to work). Finally, on their way back home, I decided to escort them to New York and experience the Big Apple (more impressions on that later as well). Besides these trips, we also had some time to visit places around Washington state (for some reason, I didn’t take that many pictures in WA, at least not with my camera – I took some with my phone).

Now I’m back. Some statistics: I was away for about 2 weeks in total. I took about 1700 pictures, most of them for HDR purposes (3 exposures, so maybe I have some 600 pictures in total). I shot both RAW+JPEG fine at full resolution (16.2MP) and managed to use about 36GB for RAW and 15GB for the JPEG. Even though my camera (Nikon D7000) has two SD card slots for recording the images, the performance penalty in shooting RAW was very high – the buffer would be filled after 6-9 exposures and you would have to wait until those exposures are written to the card.

Side note: It is a bit shocking to me to see how much space I have used with these pictures at a reasonable resolution (to be frank, on the high end) and can’t dare to imagine what would happen with a Nikon D800 that has over twice the resolution (36MP).

The faithful servants in this trip (besides the camera) were two lenses: Tokina 11-16 f/2.8 (with UV and CPOL filter) and the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 (also with UV and CPOL filters) and my tripod. I was on the fence with my 70-210 f/4-5.6, but I decided to pass on it due to the added weight and size restrictions (I only had a carry on luggage on the trip). I decided to also pass on my other lenses, the Nikon 35mm f/1.8 and 50mm f/1.8 as I am not sure I would have taken any good portraits and, even though they are small and almost weightless, the overlap with the 17-50 gave me no extra reason to bring them with me.

Off I go now, to edit some pictures, run around the house and… why not, actually sleep. I leave you with a low-light, low-quality picture of my tools.

/cd