Tintinburgh | Portugal | 2019 | Lisboa
Lisboa
This is the main album for Lisbon. Some pictures are a bit over-saturated, this is mainly because there was too much light and the exposure was off. Next time I will try different exposure metering techniques, but in reality without doing HDR it will suck.
And doing HDR on Linux is painful, it requires so much work that it is mostly not worth it.
Overall I have taken way too many photos and it was really annoying to go through all of them. I would say I will try to be more careful but I will probably continue taking way too many photos and then screaming at my past-me "Do you really need this from 50 different angles?!" and "can you go home already?"
I am getting old
I was traveling mostly alone, and being alone in an unknown city can be quite confusing. I did not have any issues in terms of navigation or logistics. But few times I was not paying attention to drinking and then I was quite out of place. I also got into some very obvious touristic traps. I knew they were traps but I could not think straight. 😢
Airbnb vs. Hostels
In Lisbon I was staying in airbnb, in Porto in a hostel. I think overall I had way more positive experiences from hostels, being alone in Airbnb just sucks and it's much easier to make friends in hostels (although in my experience everyone leaves the next day).
Oriente
Metro
Lisboa - MAAT
MAAT is a modern art gallery, in the Belem district. I was staying over at Santa Apolonia which is quite far away so I took an Uber e-bike and biked there - it took me about 40m but I took a lot of photos on my way. I paid about €10.
I think e-bikes (or other emobility solutions) are perfect for the area - they have very nice system of cycle lines and there is not that many pedestrians. That day the daily temperature was something about 27 with no clouds, walking that distance around harbour would be very risky. The only problematic part of this trip was area around Ponte 25 de Abril where I had to cross the road with some heavy traffic.
One thing I regret is that I did not visit LX Factory. I guess I have a reason to come back!
Anyway, inside MAAT they had two exhibitions, the first one Fiction and Fabrication. Photography of Architecture after the Digital Turn, is essentially about fake photos a topic very relevant to this blog! I am not really huge fan of exhibitions and I get bored easily but I really liked this one.
What I liked the most:
- Gursky, Shanghai
- Jeff Wall - Morning cleaning, it does not look very impressive here, but they had it in huge format with nice illumination... There is nice text about at valka.info
- James Welling
- Inés Lombardi
- Filip Dujardin – Chicago Shuffle, but he has a lot other stuff, sadly his website requies Flash 😿
- Bas Princen - ‘Cooling Plant (Dubai)’
Apart from that I enjoyed the first exhibition - Jesper Just. Servitudes, the dark photos below are from this exhibition.
Tajo
Oceanario
Largest indoor aquarium in Europe, about 10m from Oriente station, the permanent exhibition is certainly worth the time and money. They have one big aquarium (1,000 m2) with large fish, that one can be viewed throughout the exhibition, so don't worry if there is too many people right at the entrance.
I was most impressed by octopuses and rays. It was quite challening to take photos, mostly because it was very dark space, but also because the glass is super thick and has a strange effects so it was only possible to take photos at right angle.