Tom Burke’s Blog

I’ve added a new page for Photography – it’s here.

The page itself mainly links to other sites where I’ve got some images displayed. 

In addition to paying for cruises, I have one other major drag on my finances – cameras. I am, and have been for years, a very keen amateur photographer. Actually, I don’t spend that much on cameras, compared with – ooh, my car, the house, or indeed cruises, but given that the photography is discretionary, it feels like a larger amount than it actually is.

Back in the old days of cameras that took films (!) the principal determinants of photographic excellence were a) the skill of the photographer; b) the lens in use; and c) the film used. The actual camera was a long way down the list – it was just a box to hold the film flat & allow strictly-controlled amounts of light onto it. If you had a good lens and used decent film, there was nothing to stop you from taking the bext picture ever seen, and you could do this with the oldest, simplest camera that your lens would fit onto. True, a better or more sophisticated camera might make it easier to take ‘the greatest picture ever’. For example, if you were a sports photographer then it would be useful to have a camera that shot lots of frames per second, because that would increase your chances of getting the perfect shot of Ronaldo scoring Manchester United’s winning goal. But not having such a camera didn’t stop you from taking that shot – it would simply take more skill & judgement to do so. Then came digital, and everything changed. All other things (principally lens & software) being equal, a camera that offered higher resolution & greater dynamic range would indeed take a better picture than one that offered lower resolution & a restricted dynamic range. It’s as if you were restricted to just one type of film in your camera, and all the time you can see new types of ‘film’ that are better – sharper & offering more natural colours, perhaps – but you can’t use them! So the drive to move to the latest, greatest camera is very strong, because (unlike with film photography) it is an ascertainable fact that your pictures will be better with the latest camera. All other things being equal, of course.

So here I am with a Nikon D80, which is a very very good DSLR, and which I only bought this spring. It had the same technical characteristics as Nikon’s next camera up the chain, the D200: the difference between them being more about robustness and performance than image quality – both use the same sensor, for example. But yesterday Nikon announced a new pair of cameras, the D3 (professional camera and ruinously expensive – even I won’t contemplate that one), and the D300. And that’s the one that’s soooo tempting. 12 Megapixels instead of 10. Better noise control at all ISO ratings, but especially at high ISO. And, probably as a result of that, perhaps two stops of increased dynamic range. And those are two things that are very very likely to make images out of a D300 better than equivalent images from a D80.

Take for example this picture from Santorini this summer:


I’m quite pleased with it, and in many ways it captures the feel of that island that day – hot, bright, and deep shadows. But the shadows shouldn’t be completely black, there should still be some detail, and I think that the D80 simply hasn’t been able to hold that detail; whereas the D300 might. So the temptation is there!

Here are a couple of link to more pictures of Santorini, taken in 2006 and 2007.

I learned yesterday that P&O are shortly going to announce ‘new cruises’ for 2008. How can they do that? I wondered – I didn’t see any gaps in their schedules and believe me I practically know their 2008 brochure off by heart.

It turns out that the existing 7-night cruise on Oceana on 8 June 2008 (to Germany,The Netherlands &  Belgium) has been cancelled and a new 7-night cruise, to the fjords, put in its place. (Don’t ask me what those already booked on the originally-published cruise are going to do.) Also, a published 14-night cruise to the western Mediterranean starting on 14 November on Arcadia had been converted to a 12-night cruise starting two days later, and a 2-night ‘Weekender’ cruise (Southampton – Zeebrugge, for Bruges – Southampton) slotted into the space.

I was particularly interested in the switch to a fjords cruise for Oceana on 8 June.Regular readers will be aware that I’ve got a cruise on Ventura planned for autumn 2008. Well, the process that led to that booking started as a search for a suitable cruise on Oceana: we’d done a ship visit to her (pictures here) in July 2006 and liked her very much, and we also want to cruise the fjords. So if there had been a 7-night fjords cruise on Oceana in early June advertised in the 1st edition 2008 P&O brochure, I’m pretty sure we would have booked it. As there wasn’t I started digging around the brochure, and a few hours later I’d booked a 12-night cruise to the Canaries in September on Ventura… (it seemed to make sense at the time!)

And more: because the Ventura cruise isn’t until late September, that left a hole in spring/early summer. We’ve now filled it with a 4-night cruise on Oriana. All because Oceana’s 8 June cruise was originally published with an unattractive itinerary.

Which means I’m still looking for a fjords cruise on Oceana in June, but it will now have to wait until 2009 at the earliest.

Last night we went to see ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’. Along with half the UK population, I believe – the film only opened here this weekend. What a good film! Readers of my previous blog entry on cruises will already know that I was pleased to spot scenes locations used in previous Bourne films: the sea-food market on the harbour at Mykonos that appears at the end of Bourne Identity as the scooter-hire shop where Marie is working, and there’s also a brief appearance  of the Stazione Maritimma (the Marine Station – these days also a cruise terminal) at Naples near the beginning of Bourne Supremacy. And in this new film there’s very good set of scenes on the concourse of Waterloo Station in London which I know well. So I’m a Bourne fan.

Quite by chance I saw Casino Royale for the first time last weekend so this gave me a good opportunity to compare  these two films. (The BBC News site has published some lengthy, tongue-in-cheek comparisons: see here.) I’m firmly in the Bourne camp: I’ve seen the James Bond films change from quite edgily-vi0lent and genuinely sexy at he beginning to camp and gadget-obsessed, and frankly a curiosity – how to make a 60s movie in the 21st century. And of course Mike Myers got far to close to the truth for comfort with the Austin Powers films. No, you just can’t watch Bond movies and lose yourself in them any more.

There is much speculation as to whether there will be a fourth Bourne film – in the USA the film has so far taken $150 million, and is expected to reach $200m. No figures in yet for international totals, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were to reach $150m to $200m worldwide as well, for a total of at least $350m. In the studios’ minds that sort of gross demands a follow-up. At the outset there would have been the great difficulty that there were only three books (even though the titles are the only real thing taken from the books), but of course there has been at least one more published since the success of the first film. My personal view is that I hope that a further film is not made. I felt that Ultimatum wrapped up the whole arc very satisfyingly. I think the series has come to a fitting and logical conclusion, and I hope it’s allowed to go out on the high note it’s achieved.

So – for the last time, cue ‘Extreme Ways’……

Spring 2008 was looking a little bare, so our thoughts turned to holidays to fill it. Actually, we had promised ourselves that this time we would wait until – well, maybe not the very last minute, but until the last hour or so – before we booked anything. But that doesn’t work for us.

So we started thinking about what to do.We wanted just a short break, in late spring or early summer. Should it be a shore-based holiday, perhaps in Menorca or even a Greek island? Or how about a cruise on “Navigator of the Seas” – RCI have several 4 & 5 night cruises out of Barcelona in the spring.But no, it’s 4 nights on Oriana out of Southampton, to Rotterdam, Zeebrugge and Guernsey.

So that’s our cruising for next year. It’s a wholly P&O year: 4 nights on Oriana in the spring, and 12 nights on Ventura in the autumn.