travel

I recorded the video below using my iPhone 4, and set it to some ambient music. The views from the Willis Tower's SkyDeck (103 floors up) are truly majestic, and I hope to go again someday (next time, I'll remember my tripod!).

I will gladly do without the crazy Chicago traffic, though :)

During part of a driving tour of ancient Rome this year, our (my wife's and my) tour guide drove us to a small courtyard on one of the hills near the Colosseum. As he parked the car, I noticed two rather serious looking militia with automatic weapons standing in the courtyard—and I hoped they weren't there for me! They had their fingers over the triggers the whole time I was there, though they seemed friendly enough as we passed by on our way to a mysterious door.

The tour guide told us that there was a delightful treat waiting for us; he told us to look into a small keyhole, not a half inch in diameter, and see what we could see. It was obvious many people had touched the door around the keyhole, so it had to be a somewhat popular thing to do.

My own suspicions made me hesitate from putting my eye to the hole—whenever I'm told to do something touristy, like rub the belly of a bronze Billiken statue, I remember what college kids did to such statues—but when my eye came into focus, I saw a brilliant and beautiful sight. A sight that cannot be adequately captured by a camera:

(View at original size, to see what's in the very middle)

I was quite taken aback, as was my wife! This is one of the little treats you will miss if you only visit the main 'touristy' attractions around Rome. Apparently, the Knights of Malta (an order of Knights that has existed since the Crusades, and is still active—albeit less of a fighting order nowadays), have curated a beautiful garden so symmetrically and perfectly for quite some time, along a straight path to the dome of St. Peter's Basilica!

If you want to take a better picture than I did, use a long lens (120mm+), and set your focus manually to infinity. Expose for the dome of the basilica, and then bring up the foliage and door in post, by lightening the shadows. I only had my 18-35mm lens, so I had to shoot wide.

More history here and here. Larger image here.

This is a panorama shot from the top of St. Peters Basilica in Rome (the Cupola is the Dome).

The image is 9611x2937, and if you view the original, you can see details down to some of the furthest buildings—such as the two small domes of St. Maria Maggiore, the dome of the Pantheon, the 'Wedding Cake' (Monument to Vittorio Emmanuele II), and more! If you zoom in, you can also see the cars driving to and from St. Peter's Square.

I shot this image series on a stormy day in March with my Nikon D7000. I stitched the images together with Adobe Photoshop CS5.