On August 6, I was returning from my 3rd Eurotrip and this was also the day I was becoming a 2 year old photo enthusiast here on DeviantART. These are my gallery stats so far: [link]
This journal entry comes one year after the last Eurotrip-related one. I would have posted it a bit earlier, but I had 2500+ deviations and 500+ journal entries piled up in my inbox and I wanted to catch up with your progress first. Rest to sure, all was watched and read, eventually.

As some of you Watchers may have noticed, I've been completely idle for the last half year and I've been approximately idle and very shallow in appearance/posting since my last Eurotrip album. Well, I gotta tell you, it's been one hell of a year. Due to some feelings I didn't want to experience for the time being, I've created myself an emotional firewall, which obviously landed me to become an emotional cripple. Of course, not experiencing bad feelings has it's advantages, but my firewall got so effective that I stopped feeling good emotions as well. This also affected my photography a lot. I still took pictures, borrowed cameras, experimented settings... I haven't lost the itch for the trigger, but most of the images that I've taken had a simple concept that never went outside the box. My photography usually doesn't go outside the box, but this was worse. Besides the uncomfortable mood, I also lacked inspiring places because I haven't left town during this period. The town I was studying, that is.
I was going out a lot, drinking a lot, smoking a lot, getting home in the mornings and sleeping in the afternoons, always tired, always running for a refuge... always lonely. To spice things up, this was my last year in University, I had two licence papers to work on (double specialization), I had a lot of failed exams from my previous year and this year wasn't looking good either. Of course, the monsters were not only in my closet but also in my dormroom. This was the first year with complete strangers as roommates, and believe me, it was the most horrifying dormroom experience ever. Maybe the words "manelisti" & "cocalari" will ring many bells to some of you (sorry, no English equivalents, it's a Romanian social disease). Associate these with a 5.1 stereo sistem, a lot of mess, savage noises, vulgarity and violence and maybe you'll feel the need to go out for a drink and sleep elsewheres as well.
Believe it or not, through some divine miracle, I managed to succeed in taking 7 previously failed exams in one month (last one of school, to be precise), so now I had the right to sustain my license projects in front of the commission in order to get my diploma. Although I only actually started to work two weeks before the deadline and there were a lot of panic attacks and quitting attempts involved in the last 3 days of the countdown, I managed to finish both my projects (a cummulated 70 pages) just a few hours before my presentation.
After 32 sleepless hours and 4 not-so-long years, I graduated the "Technical-Economical Engineering" profile from the Faculty of Machine Building, all under the greater roof of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. Meaning I'm a freshly unemployed Economical Engineer (the reason I had to do both a Technical and an Economical paper for my license/diploma).
Two weeks later, I signed up for the masters degree, where I got admitted on a budget spot. So it's two more years in school, although I'll be working meanwhile. I'm hoping to get a good job, so I'll finally afford a better camera and the parts I broke on my bike a while ago. Not very ambitious, am I?
The master is called "Management & Engineering in Business".
In other news, since the 16th of July, I'm 23 years old and my ID picture is a bit out of date, because I have a short hair for 6 months now. Therefore, b e h o l d, the freshly emerged ID no.6: [link] You might also like to watch its remote, slightly dezolant sibling: [link]
Just for the record, I like the old one better: [link]


As for this year's Eurotrip, this was my third time out of the country and also on this trip, which had a different route every year. Let me introduce you a bit to its mechanism:
Taize [link] (official website), [link] (Wikipedia) is a community of approximately 100 brothers, in France, worldwide known, where approximately 5000 young people from all over the world (mostly Europe) come to take part in the community life every week. Most groups stay here for a week, but there are also volunteers that stay for the whole summer or even more. You might regard it as a camp. So the Church is the main organizer of this trip, although there's no religious criteria involved, you just have to sign up for it. We travel with a bus of 60 and the trip lasts for two weeks: one spent in Taize, the other one visiting Europe on the road to Taize and back. In 2007 & 2008, the cost for this was 210 Euros, and this year, because we went to London and Ferry expenses were added (crossing the English Channel), it cost 250 Euros. It's a fun cheap way to see Europe if you don't have other financial means. And take my word for it, that week in Taize is so wonderful that it will definitely make you dream of going there again the next year. If you have any friends that have been to Taize, just ask them about it.
Our group's route for this year was: Vienna - Strasbourg - Taize - Paris - London (2 nights) - Prague.


Back to photography, it filled my heart with frustration that I was travelling for the 3rd time through such unique places and I was still taking photos with a "soapbox" (it's what we Romanians call "compact cameras"). I almost borrowed a Fuji S6500 FD from a friend, the ideal companion for me because of its zoom range (28-300 mm), wide-angle lens and the best quality at high ISO levels that you'll ever find on a bridge camera. Unfortunately, he was also going to the mountains and was planning to use it, so I settled for a Canon PowerShot A720 IS which I borrowed from another friend, one that lent me half the money for my current digicam. As you already might know, I own a Canon PowerShot A560, which I probably complained about in all previous journal entries, because of its missing Manual mode. Well, the A720 IS has all manual and semi-manual modes, image stabilization and also a bit more generous 6x (35-210 mm) optical zoom which I found quite useful. The Canon was joined by a tripod, 6 SD memory cards of 1Gb each, 16 rechargeable batteries (the camera uses 2), 2 battery chargers and a 4Gb memory stick for eventual download. [link] A 4Gb SDHC card joined the group when I was fresh out of memory in London. The camera (8 megapixels) allows 280 full-quality exposures on a 1Gb memory card... which is not much. Anyway, I got back home with around 2200 pictures, although when I looked at the counter it showed over 3500 exposures, which means a lot of stuff was deleted directly on camera. I also brought back about 1,5 Gb of video material, all filmed with this same camera.
I'm still not out of the mental state I was describing in the first paragraph. It breaks my heart that I haven't managed to become at least a bit creative along so many famous and interesting places and objectives. Although some of the pictures may look clean and colourful, I'm very disappointed because all I managed to produce were standard postcards and not a single photograph. A wide-angle lens would have helped me produce spectacular results among the skyscrapers in Paris's La Defense for example, but there's no use blaming the camera because I know my problem is "upstairs". Another thing that limits me, besides my artistically-challenged brain, is my poor poor editing skills and my fear to get ambitious enough to conquer them and try to learn harder. I know how to work a camera, any camera, but when it comes to editing software I'm totally flushed. Knowing what can be done to an image and also knowing how to do it would definitely enable me to push my imagination on higher realms. Just to get an idea, my editing has never gone beyond: Crop - Rotate - Auto Levels - Brightness/Contrast - Shadow/Highlights - Selective Colour - Hue/Saturation - Photo Filter - Unsharp Mask - Framing.
Despite my artistic disappointment concerning this album, the Canon PowerShot A720 IS, through its Manual mode (which I was craving for a long time), actually enabled me to take better looking pictures from a technical point of view. One of my greatest joys was finally being able to work with the aperture, especially at night, where my Canon A560 would have automatically jumped to F2.6, its widest setting. Now I was able to work with more narrow apertures, like F5.6 or F7.1 at night (and especially F8 by day), increasing depth of field and also giving the street lights that star-effect, lights that on my A560 would have appeared like circular spread ugly spots. Except blowing up highlights and poor detail in the shadows, I'd recommend this camera as a great, fun compact for travelling and all around use.
This album consists of 90 images from the above mentioned places. A bit more selective than last year (140 images), but only because I had some of the places already covered in the gallery. This is a photojournalistic album, same as Eurotrip '08 and Eurotrip '07. The simple names and numbers of the images suggest that. Some of the pictures might not tickle your eye, but they're still simple and clean and their meaning is to expose some places that others might want to visit after seing what they look like or places they simply like to remember. Honestly, that is the main purpose of these albums: sharing the experience through my eyes and lens.

All these being said, I appreciate you getting this far with the reading and I invite you to enjoy the 3 Eurotrip albums I've gathered so far:

#3 - 2009: Vienna - Strasbourg - Taize - Paris - London - Prague [link]
#2 - 2008: Munchen - Zurich - Taize - Paris - Bruxelles - Amsterdam [link]
#1 - 2007: Vienna - Paris - Taize - Lyon - Cannes - Monte Carlo - Verona - Venice [link]

You might also like to check out my better works in the newly revised "Featured" pages here: [link]

PS: The "SitBack" function will prove very useful while doing this.