Category: Europe

08-26-16 Off the Beaten Path

A turn here and a turn there and you are a world away from the throngs. . . (read more)

By Scott Shephard

On a typical summer day in Venice, Italy, it is likely you’d find throngs of tourists. Some complain that the city has become a sort of Disney Land in that it is a place that people visit for all of it’s attractions and leave at the end of the day.

I don’t like crowds but being a tourist myself, I am often part of the crowd. I discovered, however, that in places like Venice it isn’t hard to “get away from it all.” This 2005 photo is evidence. Not too far from this place you’d be hard pressed to avoid bumping into someone. But here you’g be hard pressed to find another person. It’s my kind of place. I love the textures in this old place. And I love the silence, which I hope you, too, can appreciate when you look at this photo.

Canon 20D 1/15s f/4.5 ISO400 30mm

03-23-14 Walking the Dog (2004)

A man walks his dog on the dock in the bay (on the Greek island of Crete).

by Scott Shephard

I have decided that Sunday’s are going to be my “Flashback Day,” which means that I will post something from either my recent or ancient digital or film photography past. You’ll have to come back next Sunday to see if I remember saying this or if I am true to my word.

This photo was taken in 2004 from the observation deck of a cruise boat that had just docked on the island of Crete. Deb and I were on a Greek island cruise with a group of great Watertown High School students.

This is really more of a snap shot than anything, though I like the look and feel of the photo. I also like the composition, though I will admit that I knew nothing of the “rule of thirds” or of leading lines or of texture or of light and shadow, etc., etc. I must have had some subliminal grasp of these things because they are all present. Or, I just got lucky.

Canon 1DII 1/800s f/10.0 ISO320 300mm

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02-05-14 Our Italian Villa

2014 02-05 Our Italian Villa by Watertown, South Dakota, photographer Scott Shephard
2014 02-05 Our Italian Villa by Watertown, South Dakota, photographer Scott Shephard

I set the Way-Back Machine to 2008 in my quest for something refreshing (at least to me) to post. 2008 doesn’t seem like that long ago but for a photographer, who might measure time based on know-how and equipment, it was 2 cameras ago: then – the Canon 5D; now – the 5DIII.

The joke in this photo is that my good friend Scott Peterson and I are sitting down to something that doesn’t look particularly Italian and that isn’t particularly fancy. But if you note the flowers and candle gracing our pool-side table, you glimpse clues to our dinner theme on this beautiful night in June, 2008: “Presentation Is Everything.”

I refer to “Our Italian Villa” in the title, though in truth we were only renting it – for a little over $100 per night. The villa consisted of a restored farmhouse and cottages and was only two miles from Sienna. There were 6 guest rooms, including our little three room pool-side cottage. But for two days, we had the whole villa to ourselves. And, as you can see, it had a swimming pool! Perfetto, as the Italians say.

Canon 5D 1/80s f/5.6 ISO250 24mm

A “Donate” button??? Really? Well, yes. This blog, along with my photography, are labors of love. But if anyone feels compelled to offer a little support to help pay for the web hosting, I wouldn’t want to stand in your way. 🙂

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Creative Commons License

Our Italian Villa by Scot Shephard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

12-05-13 The Real Rosetta Stone

Meet the namesake for the language translation programs you see advertised on TV. . . .

When I say “Rosetta Stone” you probably think of a well-advertised foreign language learning tool. But the actual Rosetta Stone (pictured here), which is housed in The British Museum, was the key to translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics into English. There are three different languages/scripts on this stone, two of which were decipherable. But, in the the early 1800s, the top script, hieroglyphics, was still a mystery. A man named Champollion used the known scripts and pretty astute inferential reasoning to crack the code of hieroglyphics. So ends the history lesson.

If you are curious about the leap from grand daughter to son to Rosetta Stone over the last three days, don’t try to find the logic. There is none. Today, fearing that I would miss a day in “A Photo A Day” for the second time in five days, I just picked a folder of photos from 2010 and found this picture.

Your attention is no doubt waning by now, so I’ll say, “Thanks for looking.” 🙂

Canon 5DII 1/15s f/4.0 ISO1000 24mm (Notice the slow shutter speed. Shame on me!)

11-25-13 A Nicely Painted Ceiling

2013 11-24 A Nicely Painted Ceiliing
Given that I talked a bit about the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel yesterday, I thought I’d post my one and only photo of the ceiling, “accidentally” taken in 2004. Photography is not allowed, but in the crowded and somewhat chaotic chapel, my camera somehow went off. And this is what I ended up with.

See God? See Adam? See the brain? See the museum guard look at me with disdain?

Canon 5D 1/13s f/4.0 ISO1600 24mm