italia.

I’m sitting in a hotel lobby in Rome, Italy and dreading my 6:30AM wake-up call tomorrow as I write this at 11PM!

Let me backtrack…

Thursday night we departed from YVR Vancouver Airport on a nine-hour flight to London. We were delayed by a half hour but were on our way soon enough! There were further delays at Heathrow Airport as the majority of England has been experiencing a ridiculous amount of rainfall. We landed 40 minutes late and sat on the tarmac for another hour and a bit before we were taken by bus to international customs. I’ve never been on a flight for more than 5 hours, and by the end of the London flight it was 11 hours long. Anyhow: we passed the time quite well.

I come from a family of very talented self-portrait artists:

We had a four hour layover at Heathrow, which turned into 5 1/2 with all the delays. Our London to Rome was smooth and we arrived at our Rome hotel about 11:00pm Rome time. It was a perfect time for such a long day of travelling because we could easily fall asleep upon arrival.

The next day we drove to the Sorrento Area, on the Southwest Coast of Italy where our adorable hotel was located in Sant Agata. We stayed there for two nights and thoroughly enjoyed all the staff and the surroundings of the city. Sant Agata is a beautiful place, so different than Rome where I’m writing this now. One of the mornings the jet lag caught up with Brandon (my brother) and I and we both found ourselves awake at 4:30AM! We threw water on our faces and walked out the door of the hotel. What a NEAT experience to be one of the, literally, handful of people up at that ungodly hour. I took my camera and I was able to get some really neat shots of the area without having to look out for scooters or dodging cars.

 

  

 I’ve never been out of North America, so this whole trip has been a really awesome experience for me so far. I honestly had no idea what to expect in another country. I love the language! I don’t understand a word of it, and still am not sure what everybody means when they say PREGGO! (I hear it meaning Hello, Goodbye, How Are You?, Thank you)…but I like it anyway. I was just commenting today that in 2 weeks when we return back to Vancouver I’m really going to miss the constant sounds of other languages around me. My family is also really really impressed with how FRIENDLY a people the Italians are. They are SO hospitable to every stupid thing we try to communicate in English to them. They are very very understanding and do so well with the little amount of English a lot of them know. Even asking for directions to our Sant Agata hotel (which took us about 1 1/2 hours to find, after arriving in the general area!) we stopped and asked about five different Italians along the road. Only 1 could speak English well, the other 4 couldn’t speak anymore than “Hello” but offered directions as well as they knew how.

As English speakers, we are truly fortunate to know the language we do. A lot of signs, menus, people are bilingual here to a certain extent. Amongst the tourists around us, I hear many differnet languages like German, French, Norwegian, etc, and I’m just imagining how much HARDER it would be to travel in an area like Europe. If all you knew was French, and couldn’t read Italian or English, communicating would be a really big struggle.

Our hotel we are in right now, just about eight subway stops from the heart of downtown Rome is the funkiest place I’ve ever stayed in! And I’ve stayed in a LOT of hotels over my life of 16, almost 17 years. When I walked into our room, I had to snap a picture.

I’m not sure when we will have access to the internet next, but tomorrow we are on the Florence, then Venice and eventually Innsbruck, Lake Lucerne, Paris, Vienna and London. (And not exactly in that order as Brandon just informed me.)

Here are some more pictures from our adventures:

  

In front of St. Peters Basilica…I have a thing for umbrellas. 

 

 Mom, Brandon, I:

 Roma:

 

Ciao!!

 

heron family.

I have a wonderful session with a family yesterday evening around beautiful Fort Langley, BC. There’s so many neat spots and old buildings to shoot around in this historic part of town.

Meet Mom&Dad:

And their lovable children, ages 4, 8 and 6!

They were all so full of life!

Somehow, in a rather calm moment, I managed to snag these two heartbreakers…

 

Thanks again Heron family! It was so great to meet all of you.

update: latest project!

My actions are up and rollllllllllin’ and I’m VERY excited. I promise you will not be disapointed with this set. On the current site (www.jamiedelaine.com/actions) there are SIX PhotoShop actions available for purchase. You can buy them in three sets of two (grouped according to similarities!) or go for all six at once. After purchase, let me see what you did with them. I’m so excited to see these actions poppin’ up in the work of other photographers.

latest project.

 I’ve been working many hours developing some new Photoshop actions in the hopes of making them available for purchase to the photography community. Many of these actions were ideas that I used regularly in my own post-processing, but never actually sat down and figured out how to achieve the same look time and time again.These actions have actually been really fun, and frustrating at times to create. So far I have brought only five actions into the world that I am consistantly happy with, performance-wise. I leave for vacation to Europe (woohoo!) In 10 SHORT DAYS, so I’m up to my ears in business work right now. I hope to get these actions available for purchase before we leave, and upkeep sales while touring the globe.

Here’s a sneakpeek!