AIRFARE TO MOSCOW

Fodor's Spain 2011 (Full-color Travel Guide)

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A couple of years ago we treated ourselves to a "short break" holiday in Bilbao, Spain. Well, Easyjet were doing cheap flights from Bristol Airport. My first impulse in any foreign country is to dump Mrs Bentos at the shops or the beach while I go off to reconnoitre the local railway system. That way we're both happy.
Bilbao has three stations. One, the Estacion de Santander, is the terminus of a the FEVE narrow gauge system. It has a beautiful tiled facade and the train shed, which is at a considerable elevation, has a window all along one side giving a view across the roofs of the city to the surrounding hills. The place was almost deserted, with one train of miniature rolling-stock standing at a platform. Such a charming, under-used, small-scale anomaly, I reflected, would have been shut down 40 years ago in England. I took a couple of photographs.
My reverie ceased abruptly when I saw a black-uniformed policeman, complete with truncheon and gun, walking purposefully towards me. I knew what was coming of course, but pretended not to. I was wearing a beret, actually bought in Paris ten years before, which may have led him to mistake me for a local. He addressed me in Spanish, or possibly Basque ...it was all the same to me. "I'm sorry, do you speak English?" I ventured, smiling pleasantly. "No", he replied, with hauteur. A pantomime of gesture ensued. An air camera was raised before the policeman's face, he screwed up one eye and crooked an index finger above an imaginary shutter-release button. I organised my features into a look of sudden understanding. The policeman now uncrooked his index finger from its button-depressing attitude, straightened it and passed it back and forth in front of his face to indicate prohibition of the previously enacted activity. "Ah", I said. He then extended the fingers of both hands, flipper-like, turned and pointed them down towards the track. This I took to represent wheels resting on the rails. The hands, still extended, were then suddenly cast forward, as though the policeman were throwing out a bowl of water. Obviously this was supposed to be the progress of the wheels along the track. Did I intend to travel? I said not ...and the policeman pointed to the exit.
An ignominious episode. Ejected from a public place by a policeman at my time in life ...with all the added embarrassment of mutual incomprehension. To be fair, this was only a couple of weeks after the Madrid train bomb, and one can understand the sensitivity of the authorities towards people taking an undue interest in their trains; but what an illogical attitude it is. Ten minutes earlier I had photographed the Teatro Arriaga across the road. No one took any notice and no policeman had appeared. Yet, considered as a terrorist target, a crowded theatre has much to recommend it. Obviously the policeman didn't think I was a terrorist at all; he'd have arrested me if he had. It is preposterous to behave as though photographing something amounts to an intention to blow it up. It was not the time or place, but this sort of thing, so often encountered among over-inflated "security" types in England, ought to be resisted.

I made use of Ryanair's cheap flights over the last few days and hopped across to Seville. Had a great few days and the barmy weather of 27 degrees was far more pleasant than our own shores.

This shot turned into a bit of a marathon. I saw the girl and her dog approaching and only had a split second to capture one image as there were other people around that were going to walk into the scene. I just had time to increase exposure so that I got some detail in the arch, however in doing so I overexposed the white building in the background. I managed to pull some of the detail back through the RAW converter in Photoshop. I duplicated the image several times to get a wide exposure range of 6 images and then processed twice, once as a blended exposure and once as an HDR in Photomatix. I then blended the two resulting images together in photoshop to retain detail in the sky and erased the top layer to reduce noise.
In photoshop I then applied several textures and an orange fill layer before final levels, saturation, contrast and sharpening tweaks.

A view towards the Cathedral, Seville, Spain.