Let me preface this post by saying that I don’t expect everyone to have a huge level of technical expertise when it comes to photography. I really don’t. Honest.
But for the love of pete, if you don’t learn ANYTHING else about how to operate your camera, PLEASE PLEASE learn how to shut off the flash. Please. I do realize that many camera manufacturers make it somewhat challenging to do so, but not knowing how to do so is, to me, akin to owning a car and not knowing how to operate the windshield wipers, so you drive around with them going all the time whether or not you need them.
Please, for me — your friend/relative/coworker/someone whose website you randomly stumbled upon, just try it. Somewhere there should be an option that looks like a lightning bolt. You need that lightning bolt to be in a circle with a little line through it. Often cameras don’t let you shut that off unless the camera’s settings dial is turned to the P. So do that.
Why am I griping? Because it’s because of people who can’t operate their flashes (or who are just jerks and won’t turn them off) that photography is prohibited in a large number of museums and other cool places of historical interest. Flash photography can damage old stuff, so rather than outlawing flash photography (since so many people can’t operate their flashes) they just outlaw photography altogether. And then I miss cool pictures, and I get sad. :-( Actually, we all miss cool pictures.
See that sign with the picture of the camera and the circle through it? I'm a bad, bad person.
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I know that ignoring this sign is a real jerk move, and it’ll probably end me up in trouble someday, and I just shouldn’t do it. But seriously, how can I be in a room that awesome and not take pictures??? See those shelves??
THOSE ARE ALL BOOKS.
Over 250,000 of them, as a matter of fact. This is Trinity College’s Long Room, where some of the university’s oldest books are found. It’s absolutely INCREDIBLE. Cribbed from the brochure:
The main chamber of the Old Library, the Long Room, is nearly 65 metres in length, and houses around 200,000 of the Library’s oldest books. When built, it had a flat plaster ceiling, with shelves for books on the lower level only, and an open gallery. By the 1850s these shelves had become completely full. In 1860 the roof was raised according to plans by the architects Deane and Woodward, to allow the construction of the present barrel-vaulted ceiling and gallery bookcases. Marble busts are placed down either side of the room, a collection begun in 1743, when 14 busts were commissioned from the sculptor Peter Scheemakers. Other sculptors represented are Simon Vierpyl, Patrick Cunningham, John van Nost and Louis Francois Roubiliac, whose bust of the writer Jonathan Swift is one the finest in the collection.
THEY RAISED THE ROOF TO FIT IN MORE BOOKS. THAT’S HARDCORE, YO.
So yeah, I ignored the sign. So shoot me. Three things helped me get these pictures:
1.) A great wide-aperture, wide-angle lens.
2.) A great incognito camera bag (I’ll be doing a review on this camera bag at some point — suffice to say, it’s awesome!
3.) The entrance of a group of noisy schoolkids, who sufficiently distracted the two security guards that I could sneak these (even though I couldn’t look through the viewfinder to do so.)
I absolutely love the barrel vault ceiling. Love it. Want to run my hands over its lovely glossiness.
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It was substantially darker in this room than these pictures indicate. Yaaay for my new lens. :-)
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In retrospect, I really should have shot these at 1600 ISO, or dropped the exposure and upped it in post-processing, or something else so that they weren’t a bit blurry. But I couldn’t exactly futz around openly with my camera, could I? Even with my cool little incognito camera bag, I still risked being noticed. Oh well, these aren’t horrible, at least. I’m just picky about blurriness.
One of the room's many busts. I wish I could see who -- in the large version, I can make out the letters of the first and last name--T.L.
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"The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them." ~Samuel Butler
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The rest of today was ok, but it had a start I’d rather not remember (which is, of course, why I’m writing about it here.) I’ve slept horribly the past two nights. Yaay jet lag, I know. It’s insanely frustrating to me though, because I NEVER have issues with jet lag. Ever. Joel! and John can verify this. So the fact that it’s been kicking my butt these past two days is really really ticking me off, to put it mildly. So anyway, I couldn’t fall asleep this morning until almost 4AM… and I woke up shortly before 1PM. Ummm, whoops. I didn’t bother setting my alarm, because honestly, how often do I oversleep? How about never? The absolute latest I ever sleep, regardless of bedtime, is around 9 or so. Which would have been a bit later than I wanted to be up, but still fine… So when John woke me up at 12:45 and announced the time, to say that I was a bit upset was an understatement. Profanity was said, chaos ensued, and we finally got downtown and to Trinity College (to see the Book of Kells, a 1200-year-old illuminated manuscript) about an hour later.
The thing that frustrates me about Dublin (well, and a lot of places) is that the museums and other cool historical places tend to shut down around 5PM. I liked London because a lot of the museums had one day a week where they were open until 9 or 10–what a great idea! Here, the only public exhibit that’s open that late is the National Library, which had one measly exhibit on Yeats, which I liked, except that they somehow COMPLETELY omitted one of his most famous poems (“The Second Coming”.) To be fair, they did have lots of neat manuscripts and letters and recordings and such, but still. DUDE. That’d be like doing something on Walt Disney and forgetting to mention Minnie Mouse, as far as I’m concerned.
The other frustrating thing, besides the early close times, is that in Dublin, the National Gallery, National History Museum, and Museum of Modern Art are all government-run, so they’re free… but they’re not open Mondays. So I was going to try to cram in all 3 today (since we have to be at the airport at 1 tomorrow) and instead, since I overslept, we made it through about 45 minutes of the history museum before they kicked us out because they were closing. Oh, and since it’s government-run, they say they close at 5… but they really start pushing you out of the exhibits at 4:45. LAME.
Anyway. At least we got to see the Long Room — that was so worth it!!! That’s why I decided to go to the effort of hooking up my camera to my computer to get these pics online–it was just that cool.
Ya know, you’d think that with all the jet lag I’ve been dealing with and related late-night wakefulness, I’d have all of my other pictures processed and uploaded… nope. But I have spent untold hours reading up on 20th century European history, specifically the Balkans and the rise and fall of Communism. Ahhh Wikipedia, my love and my nemesis. It’s like crack. I can’t help it. So many lovely little links.
Anyway, I’m going to go shower now and try to get some sleep, since it’s almost 1:30 AM. I am NOT going to oversleep again, darn it!!!! :-p
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