Downtown Marseille, as seen from the train station.

“They” often say that when out taking photos, look behind as you often miss a great view. I tend to forget to do this the majority of the time but occasionally I do remember and it pays off. This brilliant view was taken as we were leaving Marseille, walking up the stairs to the train station.

What I like about this shot is that it shows a side of the city you may not usually see. The port and seaside are the main attractions and so great views like this can be overlooked. The makeup of the buildings reminds me a little of a middle-eastern city (just a little) and with the hills in the background it has a great feeling of distance.

The opera house in Lyon, France.

Taking shots at night is extremely difficult without a tripod, particularly in open spaces where there are no good places to lean or momentarily place your camera.

A lot of my night shots are hence taken with a lot higher ISO, which introduces a lot of grain. I’ve come to terms with this nowadays.

I didn’t know what this building was at the time we saw it — it was already closed for the evening so we never went in. The arches remind me of the GPO in Melbourne, though the rest of the building is obviously not the same.

At least I think it is La Saone, it’s hard to tell just from Google Maps.

Lyon is around two thirds from the top of France (with Paris being one third from the top), so a great place to stop. It’s famous for being a centre of great food as well as (and I only just found this on Wikipedia now) being the home of Interpol.

The three French cities we visited are, ironically, the three largest. Our stay in Lyon was short, but it was quite a lovely place.

Bern’s old town is a charming place. This is just across the river from the Bear Pit, within the original town.

I’m really glad we decided against going to Zurich and instead opted for Bern when making our Swiss travel arrangements. Unfortunately we missed out on seeing the Alps up close (our train traveled near them, but not too near).

Starting in Vienna I really picked up on using foreground objects to try and block out undesirables. You can just see the car here, though I could probably block it out in some post-processing should I desire.

I think the flowers are actually a little too out-of-focus here, but because of the way the colours are layered you can still tell what you are looking at.

Yet another building I’m unable to locate or identify. It’s in Bern, somewhere.

Whenever I am unable to identify a building, I can usually look at the photos just before and after to jog my memory into telling where and when I took the shot.

With this shot, there was a long period of time where we were walking down a hill, to where we were almost back at our hotel. It might have been when we had a rest on a bus which went to a far off destination and back again, but I can’t even find where that was.

Quite frustrating really — and I wonder why I only took one shot, and why I took so few before or after.

A lovely building in Berne, Switzerland.

I’d really like to pinpoint which building this is and where it is, but I really can’t tell. From the photos taken before and after I can see it’s near a funicular and the Christian church.

One of the gadgets I brought with me — the GPS recording unit — hasn’t really worked out too well. The initial plan had been to record where we went as a great chunk of data that could be leveraged at a later date.

The software, however, has to to parse all the data but freaks out when it sees the 130,000 points it needs to work through. This means I have no GPS data to link into my photos which is something I dearly wanted to do for our trip photos and also for any further shoots I do.

On topic: I don’t remember this shot at all, but when looking through the Berne shots this one popped out and begged to be uploaded. The angle is nice; I think it needs to be a tad straighter but the overall image is pleasant.

Along Adelaide’s “North Terrace” are a large grouping of 19th century buildings. These buildings are museums, universities, concert halls and of course, churches.

I knew almost nothing of Adelaide before our whirlwind visit. For instance, I didn’t know the CBD (and northern CBD) were completely surrounded by a ring of parkland. Very unique and great town planning — if only they’d stuck with it.

Along the North Terrace, we saw at least four or five weddings in progress, so it was difficult to avoid capturing a happy couple!