Craig’s Blog

The side trip to Italy as part of the trip to Austria and the Czech Republic provided the opportunity to see a lot of architecture and history that has always been on my list of things to see in my life. My friends and I decided to take the opportunity while in Rome to take the Eurostar bullet train out to Florence and see another city while in Italy.

We grabbed a map for Florence out of the train station and started out walking tour of the city. The narrow city streets were full of buildings with amazing detail such as the one captured below.

We made our way over to the famous Ponte Vecchio which is one of the most highly photographed landmarks in the city. This bridge spans the Arno river and has always had merchants and shops on it since its construction. It was mentioned that the economic concept of bankruptcy originated here – when a merchant could not pay his debts the table he sold his wares on was physically broken. When walking across the bridge you quickly realize there are a lot of shops in a very small space and tourists are everywhere trying to make a deal on jewelry or other merchandise.

My favorite location during the walking tour of Florence had to be the Cathedral of Florence. This structure was truly impressive not only in its sheer size but in the details in the architecture. It is considered one of the greatest engineering feats during the early Renaissance era. It is also referred to as the Duomo, after the Italian word for cathedral.

This picture is of the beautiful fresco on the interior of the Cupola (dome) in the cathedral. This is a representation of the last judgment and was done by the Italian artists Vasari and Zuccari and required over ten years to complete. 

I am really glad we decided to take the trip - it provided a comparison point to Rome and for me personally I enjoyed the fact that Florence was a smaller city. It has the history, impressive architecture, great dining and shopping all in a small location that you can navigate easily. 

My final blog post in this series will cover the trip to Rome and will be up by the end of next week. I hope you enjoyed the pictures.

School is now officially over and I am committed to ramping up my photography and the posts here. The 22 month journey was a long one but thanks to the support of family and friends I made it through it. Now it is time to go through all the photographs from the last 5 months and get them on here.

Our visit to Prague in the Czech Republic was my favorite part of our trip to Europe. Prague is an amazing city with so much history, interesting architecture and night life that the 4 nights we spent there were not nearly enough. It is definitely on my list of places to revisit in the future. The entire class went on a walking tour of the city and it was snowing almost the entire day which made for pretty bland sky but some interesting texture in the shots.

My favorite location during the tour was Prague Castle. Here is a guard on duty outside the castle area – he refused to look at the camera in every shot that I have of him.

The next place that we visited on the grounds of Prague Castle was St. Vitus Cathedral. The outside of the Cathedral was amazing.

The inside of the Cathedral was enormous.

The other side of the Cathedral – very Gothic looking.

I really liked the image above and decided to try an antique plate finish on it in Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro. It really brings a different feel to the picture.

The other prominent location on our walking tour was the Old Town Square. We visited this area often throughout out stay due to the number of places to eat, shopping, etc. The Prague Astronomical Clock pictured below was the most photographed part of the town that I came across during my trip. It is billed as the largest Astronomical Clock in the world.

I really enjoyed the stay in Prague and I really want to return as there is so much more to see. The people were friendly, it was relatively inexpensive and it seems the perfect location for history, night life, shopping and photography. My next post on the blog will be from my stay in Rome as part of this trip. It will definitely be a multi part post as I have a lot of photographs to share.