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.

The picturesque Schloß Schönbrunn in Vienna.

At this point in our trip, I was beginning to make good use of foreground objects to hide people. There are still some people visible in this shot, but I think the low angle coupled with the flowers — and then the out-of-focus flowers — really works well.

The colours — the reds and purples of the flowers, and the blue of the sky — contrast well with the yellow of the building. I think it might be a little overprocessed and the conversion from Adobe RGB to sRGB made it look a little sick (i.e. green) which I possibly overcompensated by using Lightroom’s “tint” feature, as well as the sky changing colour a bit much. Very annoying and I still haven’t got the process down pat.

As we walked through Schloß Schönbrunn towards the exit, there was a small chapel within the building. Inside the chapel was a man playing an acoustic guitar, with classical music. We stepped inside for a moment to listen to the man play; without amplification, the music filled the entire room. Most certainly a magical moment.

Yesterday, Justine and I made our way up to the Tesselaar Tulip Festival in Silvan (or Monbulk, somewhere) to see tulips, clog dancing, poffertjes, cheese racing and don’t forget the tulips.

After driving up and down through the Dandenongs, we arrived at the tulip farm. While looking for a parking spot, an area with old farm machinery caught my eye; I decided to head back there a bit later and shoot a few shots.

We paid our thirty bucks to get in, and after not receiving a tulip, we walked up and down the rows of tulips a couple of times; the whole while I tried to shoot interesting photos that didn’t contain a person — no easy feat since there were literally hordes of people standing in the rows having their photo taken.

The line for the poffertjes was at least 10 minutes long, and they were overpriced anyway, so we didn’t bother. We watched a couple of minutes of clog dancing before beginning to tire of the dancing. We made our way back to the car and Justine and I parted ways; she went to the car while I spent about 10 minutes shooting the farm machinery I mentioned earlier.

I’m glad I ordered a new 2GB CompactFlash card the other day since I have filled my existing 1GB card no less than three times in the last few weeks.

The only problem is going through all the photos I’ve been taking!

For Justine’s birthday, I had a dozen white roses delivered to her work. Justine has never had flowers delivered, which probably says something bad about me; in my defense, I don’t really “get” flowers, they look OK for a bit and then die — kind of like River Phoenix, I suppose. In any case, I buy Justine flowers rarely but when I do, they’re never delivered.

Since I bought the flowers over the Interweb, I had to use my credit card. A few minutes after I’d put the details through, I received a confirmation. A few minutes after that, I received a “denied” email. I called the 1300 number immediately, was talked to by a helpful lady who ran it through again, successfully this time.

Justine received her flowers on time and all was good.

Until I saw my credit card statement online. I’d paid for two sets of flowers and only received one. I called first thing Tuesday morning (even though I had to work Monday, no one else did it seems) and was met with an extremely rude lady who obviously didn’t believe a thing I said and basically told me to bugger off, and she would call me back. Gee, the service was good when you were trying to get my money, but now you’d taken too much and I wanted it back? How insulting of me.

Well, I got a call at about ten minutes to five — from the same lady — who was extremely apologetic about the whole thing and said she’d reverse the charges on one of the transactions. Good-o. No apologies about the way she’d acted earlier though; and, as I write this, no transaction has been reversed.

The service from Roses Only was good, until I had to deal with a person; then, not so good.

Update 2005-06-17 12:38: I checked my bank balance and the reversal has finally gone through. Could have been a worse experience, I suppose.