Again, it’s been a long long time since I last wrote. It’s been quite a busy summer.

In the last 2 months, I’ve visited Scotland, Amsterdam and Crete. Hooray for being a student! ;) I’ve also entered my last year of faculty, as a so called “absolvent”. Basically, that means no more lectures or practical work, just a year to write my diploma. Hooray!

I will upload photos from Scotland in the next few weeks. I don’t want to make them public just yet.

Meanwhile, here’s a set from yesterday’s trip. We’ve been to the coast. But not just any coast. We’ve visited the Sečovlje salina – a place where salt is being produced, making our food taste a wee bit better. Salina has been transformed into a nature park, allowing visitors to walk around and enjoy the surroundings.

The place is just astonishing

As always, I wasn’t quite happy just doing landscape photography, so I experimented with the flash …

… and also, some fashion-like photography

View the full set, or better yet, the slideshow.
Sadly, it seems as yesterday was the last day of summer around here. But on a brighter note, autumn was always very photogenic. Expect some colours soon.

And I’ve almost got used to writing that name. It’s quite obvious when you think about it. There’s Lanersbach and just before it, you can find Vorderlanersbach. Have a map.

And what does one do there? Snowboard. And take photos, of course. From portraits, still life and action shots to night shots.

Also, what better way to test your flash than telling the children to look at the light as it will erase their memory? But once they god used to it I even got them to hold a plate by their face to bounce the light. A model as well as an assistant. Great!

December has been quite busy for me. Working, studying, travelling, … And I’ve just realised, christmas has passed already. I hope it was as merry as everybody wished you to be :)

My first trip was in Slovenia - I was a tourist guide to be exact. A crappy one though, as I don’t know much history around the famous buildings and have no idea why some things are famous. But I have realised, Slovenia is very nice. Have a look:

Knowing Slovenia, I was prepared to fly to London. I’ve been there before, but it’s been a while, I was there for only one day, plus I was still quite young. This time I’ve stayed 4 days. It’s impressive. Very nice, so beautifully organised (mind the gap though) and full of kind people. And surprisingly the weather was much better than in Ljubljana.

bad news: I don’t have much time lately to blog.
bad news #2: I don’t have anything very interesting to write.
good news: I have time to take photos. I hope you like photos.
good news #2: I’ve been to Florence (Firenze). I’ve also been to Venice (Venezia).

I constantly kept getting that “hmm, I studied this once” feeling in Florence. In Venice as well, but there it was more “Look, a pigeon”.

What I’ve learnt? A few things …

• The Duomo in Florence is really impressively huge
• There is too much traffic in Florence
• Venice is peaceful. No traffic on the streets, just in the canals
• Pigeons in Venice don’t mind a bit of flash, but full power in their eyes scares them ;)
• Buying a katana sword is cheaper than a gondola ride in Venice
• Off camera flash really is that great. My luggage was a G9, a 430 EX and an OC-E3. And let’s not forget the superb Gorillapod.

The photos …

As some of you know, I was part of Zero.99 seminar in Zagreb, talking about web accessibility with Jasna Medar.

All in all, we had a nice trip. The seminar was quite interesting, some reports very informative and we got to see some funny videos as well. Professors were all very impressed with us (ego boosting effect). We got to see Zagreb afterwards as well. It’s a nice city. Looks good trough the wide angle lens, plus a local girl took us to a pub with home brewed beer. Tasty.

There are a couple of ways how you can experience what was going on. Non-slovene speaking readers may have a few problems with these. Just skip to the photos.

Videos
Open these with VLC. It’s best if you just copy the url and paste it into the url field of VLC’s “File -> Open network”

• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb01.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb02.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb03.ts

I’m not telling when I am on, but Jasna may be the first in video #3 ;)

Slides
You can scroll trough the slides we used for our presentation.

Photos
As always, I have a few …

If you’ve just tuned in, and want to know more about web accessibility, head over to Slo-Tech version of our paper - part 1 and part 2. If you either want to know even more, or don’t understand a word of this funny language, try the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Back home from the north! :)

I’ve visited Tallinn, ate some great pancakes and had a big laugh at the hostel. Totally euphoric.
We continued the trip to Helsinki, where I stayed for 2 weeks, learned a few things about product development, visited Nokia, Tekla and Fortum and spent a really great time with great people.
Then we took the ferry to Stockholm, where we finally got to see the reindeers.

Well, they say a picture is worth a 1000 words, so see the photo gallery for a better description on what was going on.