Bottles of Chianti and Brunello wine at a Montalcino Enoteca (wine bar)
A trip to Tuscany inevitably means a glass of red Chianti Classico for most visitors. But what makes a Chianti wine special?
Chianti Classico must come from grapes grown in a strictly defined area of the Chianti hills between Florence and Siena, centered around Castellina, Gaiole, Radda and Greve (see map below). There are also rules on the grape content that have changed over the years. Since the 1990s, Chianti Classico has to contain at least 75% Sangiovese grapes, a maximum of 10% Canaiolo, at most 6% white wine grapes and up to 15% Cabernet, Merlot or Syrah.
The definition of Chianti is controlled by the DOCG, the Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita. In the past 30 years or so, Chianti’s reputation has gone from fairly low grade red to a region producing some world-class wines. In the 1970s-90s, it was common to see low-grade Chianti in its traditional straw bottle jacket or fiasco. In 1971, the Antinori family broke with tradition in releasing a “Chianti-style” blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet called Tignanello. Because it didn’t fit the DOCG definition of Chianti at the time (which didn’t allow Cabernet and required at least 10% white wine grapes), it wasn’t officially Chianti Classico. Very quickly, however, the wine began to win awards and acclaim, prices rose and other producers followed. Thus the “Super Tuscan” wines were born. The success of Super Tuscans led the DOCG to change the rules of grape composition in the 1990s, allowing many Super Tuscans to be reclassified as true Chianti Classico.
Chianti Classico is what the French would call an “Appellation” — in other words, the grapes must be grown within a strict geographical boundary. Contrast this with a Napa wine, for example, which is more of a brand: the wine might be made within the boundaries of Napa, but the grapes could have been trucked in from the central Californian coast.
The original boundaries were laid down in 1716 by Cosimo III di Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and covered the Tuscan villages of Castellina, Gaiole and Radda. In 1932, Chianti was vastly expanded to cover seven different regions, of which Chianti Classico, the original, was just one. Today, the area of Chianti Classico is roughly 100 square miles.
If you read the previous article, you now know the answer to the question “why doesn’t my American cell phone just work in Europe?” and what to do about it. This article will take a look at the various data services that are on offer for Americans who want to send e-mail, surf the net or transmit digital photographs back to base while traveling in Europe or elsewhere.
There are four types of data service available in Europe that you’re likely to see (if you’re wondering why GSM is the only technology covered, read the previous article). Continue reading →
To many Americans, staying in touch with a cell phone or tablet while in Europe can seem difficult and expensive. But savvy travelers know it doesn’t have to be. Having a phone while you’re there can be a major time saver and convenience. This article tells you how to stay in touch and save money.
Advanced mobile phone usage in Lucca, Italy
Why don’t US cell phones “just work” in Europe? For various reasons, the United States developed and deployed wireless technologies that were incompatible with those deployed in the Rest Of the World, which went with a standard called GSM (“Global System for Mobiles” – one of the reasons why Europeans use the term “mobile” and not “cell phone”).
This meant that for many years, the only option for US travelers to Europe was to rent a GSM phone, which was expensive and inconvenient. No one could reach you on your US cell phone number; you had the hassle and cost of receiving and returning the phone, and both handset rental and calls were astonishingly expensive.
GSM comes to America
Today, you can buy US mobile phones that use the GSM system from AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile. So why don’t these phones “just work” in Europe? Although they use GSM, they work on different radio frequencies. To function in Europe, a GSM phone must operate (at the very least) on the 1800MHz frequency; to get the best European coverage it must operate on both 900MHz and 1800MHz. And this is just for regular GSM — for 3G services, you need 2100MHz in Europe and 1900MHz in the US.
The net? Make sure you buy a phone that clearly states is can be used internationally or is called a “World Phone”. If in doubt, find out what frequencies it offers and check them. There are more and more multi-band GSM phones coming on to the market every month, so the good news is that it’s now a lot easier to find a good international phone.
What if I’m on Verizon or Sprint?
Verizon uses a system called CDMA, and Sprint uses both CDMA and another proprietary system called iDEN, originally developed for Nextel. However, Verizon in particular has figured out that it is losing a lot of nice profitable international traffic as a result, and now has phones that support both US CDMA and international GSM frequencies. Verizon calls these “Global Phones“. The line-up changes every couple of months as new phones are released, but the Blackberry: Bold 9930, Torch 9850; Motorola Droid 3, Droid 2 Global; and HTC: Droid Incredible 2,Trophy are all CDMA/GSM world phones available at the time of writing.
The most significant new Global Phone for Verizon and Sprint is the iPhone 4S, which is the first Apple iPhone that works on both CDMA and GSM networks. Verizon iPhone 4 and iPad 2 customers are out of luck — both are CDMA-only and will not work in Europe.
The most significant new tablet is the “New iPad” — the one released in March 2012 that has no official name. The Verizon version supports 4G LTE in the US, but is also fully compatible with 3G GSM networks world-wide.
Photography began with the concept of capturing light in a single plane — the idea of what’s in and out of focus in an image has been central to photographic composition for more than 100 years. The photographer’s job has been to direct the viewer’s attention by deciding which subjects are in focus, while ensuring that the background (and less frequently, the foreground) are appropriately blurred. The Lytro camera turns that entire concept on its head by delivering a “living image” where the viewer can change the point of focus to explore the image.
My Lytro camera arrive on Friday, and I couldn’t wait to try it out. What follows is my review of the 1.0.0 version of the Lytro camera and 1.0.0 software following a weekend of playing, trying to take good photographs.
I’d love to embed some Lytro photos in this post, but that doesn’t seem to work. So, instead, here’s a link to my Lytro gallery (opens in a new window): Lytro example
The Lytro camera “out of box” experience is very well done and will be very familiar to anyone who owns an iPod or iPhone. It comes in a white box, with the camera held firmly in place with plastic inserts. Underneath the camera is a white cardboard box containing the paperwork, lens cap, cleaning cloth, wrist strap and USB cable.
The camera itself is small — just 4.4 inches long — and arrives with some charge in the battery so you can start shooting immediately. It’s shaped like a square tube, with the lens at one end and a small viewing screen at the other:
Lytro light field camera
A small power button on the bottom turns on the camera, and the shutter button is on the top. Zooming is accomplished by dragging a finger left and right on the rear top edge of the camera. It’s a little clunky, as it can be hard to set just the right composition, but it works.
The camera is fully automatic: it sets aperture, shutter speed and ISO automatically. You can tap on the rear screen to tell the camera the exposure metering point and it will do its best. The Lytro tries very hard to maintain maximum f2 aperture to capture the best light field — after all, the camera still has to deal with the physics of lenses and light. If the aperture is stopped down, all the light rays enter the lens more or less perpendicular to the sensor and parallel to each other — in other words, there’s very little light direction information. The Lytro works just like any other camera at that point. There’s a little clicking sound when you point the camera at a very bright object like the sky on a sunny day, and exposure is reduced. It’s not clear what’s going on inside the camera to achieve that, though I suspect it’s inserting an optical component to reduce the light hitting the sensor.
In “Everyday mode” (the default), the Lytro takes photos instantaneously when you press the shutter button. There is no need to focus given it’s a light field capture. There is also “Creative mode”, accessed by swiping a finger upwards on the rear screen and tapping a small icon. In this mode, you can tell the camera where you want the midpoint of focus and the camera focuses the lens. Once again, the physics of optics crashes the party — the camera has to (in effect) focus the lens on nearby objects to capture the range of potential focus points that the photographer requires for the scene.
The net? Everyday mode requires very careful framing and composition of subjects to give the viewer an interesting set of subjects separated by distance. While the camera might be point and shoot, the composition work is anything but instantaneous! Creative mode offers more flexibility in composing the subjects by distance (handy if they are inanimate) and careful control of the camera to ensure it is properly “focused”. The square (1:1) aspect ratio of the image doesn’t help with composition, making it hard to get everything into the frame.
This is really the crux of the challenge presented by the Lytro: how to use it to produce an effective photograph that is interesting and aesthetically pleasing for the viewer. Many of the examples on the Lytro website are contrived compositions with near and far elements to show off the novelty of being able to re-focus after the fact. If that is all there is for light field images, then its impact on photography has been dramatically over-hyped.
Plugging the camera into your Mac (Windows support is promised this year) allows you to install the Lytro Desktop software — a nice touch. Once installed, you unplug and replug the camera to download images. You can then view the images — though not at full size — and change the focus point. You can also share images on Facebook and Lytro’s own website… and that’s it. There’s no way to export JPEGs or other traditional image types. The only way to show an image is through the flash file stored on the Lytro website, which is severely limiting.
Lytro touts the camera’s low-light capabilities, but I was very disappointed. There is significant banding, lines and other odd artefacts at high ISO levels. Shutter speeds are low, even at f2, so camera shake is a real problem, and there’s no flash integration.
Overall, the Lytro camera is intriguing more for its possibilities than what it can do today. Version 1.0.0 is pretty basic and effective composition is extremely time-consuming. With light field photography, we ought to be able to produce 3D photographs, change the viewers position, tilt and shift the plane of focus to our liking… there are many more possibilities than capabilities in the current software.
An extremely common question, especially for those heading to Europe for the first time, is what kind of plug adapter to use for their cameras, laptops, phones, iPads etc. In this video, I take a look at three common adapter types and show you how they work. I also show you what to look for to make sure your particular device will work on European voltages, and what kind of devices won’t work.
This really is one of those topics where literally taking a look at the converters is so much better than reading about them. Enjoy!
We recently got back from a photo trip to Tuscany, where we got to see the July Siena Palio. This short (1 min 30 sec) video gives you a glimpse of the intense emotions of the Sienese around their favorite cultural festival. The video shows the drawing of the horses, where each one is randomly assigned to a contrade, who them parade the horse through the town on the way to their secret stable location (to make sure their rivals can’t nobble the horse!)
Travelling with your AT&T iPhone to Europe? Here’s how you can make sure it works when you get there and avoid a giant bill when you get back. Who doesn’t like to save money?
First, a quick note for Verizon iPhone 4 / iPad 2 owners: sorry, your phone/tablet won’t work in Europe. See my other article on cellphones in Europe to understand why, and what your options are.
If you haven’t done so already, register with AT&T’s MyWireless web site so that you can make changes to your phone plan options online. Log in with your wireless number and PIN code, so that you get to the home screen for your wireless service. Look for the “Quick links” section in the top-right quadrant of the page, which will look like this:
Renting a villa in Italy, France or Spain isn’t just for millionaires or recluses. Perhaps surprisingly, villa rental can be more reasonable than staying in a hotel, especially if you’re a family a larger group (though being a millionaire does help if you want to rent an entire Tuscan village from the Ferragamo family — yes, the shoe people).
Early morning sunlight rises over the patio of an Italian villa in Chianti, Tuscany, Italy
There are just five simple steps:
1) Decide if a villa vacation is for you. The pros are that you’ll have a base for a week or two that you can come back to each night. You can stay in all day, lounge by the pool or in the garden, take in the culture somewhere else, eat in or out… all up to you. The cons are that there’s no daily maid service or other hotel amenities, you are in the same place (so visiting places far from base means a longer round trip), and you have to keep the place reasonably clean and tidy. You’ll likely be doing cooking yourself if you stay in, though you can also hire a cook. Personally, I am happy to trade hotel amenities for a more relaxed and flexible vacation.
2) Pick a country and general geography — South of France, Tuscany etc — based on the kind of things you want to do and see. Get a few guidebooks to places you think you might like to go. My personal favorites are the Dorling Kindersley “Eyewitness” travel guides (DK guides), and the Rough Guides. I like the DK guides because they’re chock full of photographs so you can get a better idea of what a place is really like, and they’re also a good starting point for planning photography trips. The Rough Guides are impeccably researched with good writing on places, history, art and contemporary life, with great vignettes on the famous locals. However, although brimming with great maps to get you around, they are sparsely illustrated when it comes to photos. Continue reading →
We are starting the new year with site improvements for lodgephoto.com and this blog. We have moved to a hosting company with far better web server and database performance, which substantially improves the response speed of the blog, in particular.
We’ve also re-vamped our home page to be a slideshow of some of our most popular and dramatic photographs, and we fixed problems with our email sign-up. We hope you find these changes increase your enjoyment of the site and help you find the images you want.
