ColorGrinder’s Malta Pages

If you want to get off the beaten track in Malta, and are prepared to swap your flip flops for walking shoes, you will experience a side of Malta that most tourists never see. To point you in the right direction, the Malta Tourism Authority have published a great series of countryside walk guides which can be downloaded for FREE from www.visitmalta.com.

One hot Saturday in June 2010 I got off the bus in Ghadira armed with bottled water, cameras, tripod and a printed copy of the Marfa Ridge Walk brochure. It was a very hot day and the German football team were meeting Argentina in the World Cup quarter final later that afternoon so I figured that I would follow the the walk for a couple of hours and then find a bar with a big TV to watch the match.

I left the beach at Ghadira, packed as it always is in the summer with a mix of tourist families, language students and a few brave locals, and walked up onto the northern part of the Marfa ridge. The road is quiet and bordered by scrubby trees. Clumps of wild thyme and straggly fennel bushes are everywhere and give up a delicious fragrance if you crush the leaves or seeds between you fingers. To the right of the road, dusty paths lead to low cliffs and great views of the bay. This HDR shot was taken about halfway down the ridge.

Further down the road, past Malta’s only camp site (update 28/07/10. There is more than one camp site in Malta – see comments), the trees thin out. The Immaculate Conception chapel stands at the  end of the headland.  Close by, rather close to the cliff edge is a statue of Our Lady.

After checking out the chapel I set off towards the white tower and pretty much the most northerly point of mainland Malta. On the way I passed through areas where swathes of jagged agave plants competed for space with the wild thyme bushes. If you are doing the walk with bare legs, give them a wide berth or you will find out just how prickly these plants are.

From the agave bushes I continued down the hill and eventually came to the campsite entrance. I turned right here and walked up the rocks towards a very large radio antennae. Just behind the fenced off area is a large depression where the rocks have fallen in to leave a crater that is open at one end to the sea. Here at Ahrax Point you have excellent views of Comino and Gozo. I sat on the rocks for a while and watched a variety of craft ranging from ferries to jetskis making their up and down the Comino Channel.

By now I was beginning to think of a beer and the football match so I headed back up to the ridge road by way of Little Armier Bay. The Malta Tourist Authority walk continues for a couple more hours on the southern part of the Marfa Ridge. I will save that for my next visit.

 

Today we went live with our new FORUM, courtesy of the nice people at bbpress. We have a bunch of categories covering all aspects of things to do and see on our favourite Mediterranean islands. Help out your fellow surfers and be one of the first to post!

Over the last year or so, I have been seeing increasing numbers of HDR (High Dynamic Range) images on blogs and photo sharing sites. HDR images are made by using special software to  merging several  differently exposed images together into a single image. On a trip to Malta this summer I decided to try HDR photography and I am going to share some of the resulting pictures with you here.

A single camera exposure is usually made to show good detail in the main subject regardless of whether the highlights burn and the shadow areas block up. We don’t have any other option but to expose for the area of the scene that we are most interested in.  In real life we have the luxury of being able to widen our pupils to peer into shadows or to screw up our eyes to look at brighter parts of the scene. HDR photography mimics this real life behavior by taking separate images to capture shadow, mid tone and highlight detail before combining them into a single image. I used Photomatix software to do the clever stuff. Do some Googling to find out more about the technique. In the meantime, here are some of the images that I took.   

Starting near Mgarr, the first shot is of the Ta Hagrat Neolithic temples. They are smaller than the more famous sites at Hagar Qim, Mnajdra, Ggantija & Tarxien but are definitely worth a visit if you are in the area. They are only open to the one day a week (I think) but you can get a reasonable shot of them through the fence. Whilst you are in Mgarr, take a look at the ‘egg church’ with it’s oval dome and the bomb shelter underneath the ‘Il Barri’ restaurant.

The next shot is one of Malta’s trademark dghajsas. Literally translated dghajsa means boat in Maltese but it usually refers to the traditional narrow rowing boats that can still be seen in the Grand Harbour. Dghajsa’s are rowed standing up with the oarsman(men) facing the direction of travel. On the 31st of March each year (Freedom Day), a regatta is held with boats from the Three Cities and other towns competing  against each other. This boat was photographed in Dockyard Creek as the the limestone buildings turned gold in the setting sun         

 

One of the problems with combining several photos together is that you have to keep the camera AND the subject still. A tripod is very useful but not always essential as most software packages try to align the images. In this shot, taking in the evening in Kalkara, the water was calm but not 100% still so the boats did move a little between shots. I had to tidy it up a little in Photoshop to remove blurred edges and the like.

 

The sun had just disappeared over the hill behind Mgarr church when I took this picture from the deck of the Gozo ferry. I didn’t have my tripod handy but was able to balance the camera on one of the ships deck rails.

 

The moment that the rising sun appears as a tiny speck above the waves by Fort Ricasoli. I should probably have waited a few minutes until the sun was more prominent in the sky.

 

This tiny chapel and cemetary stands close to the entrance to the Mediterranean Film Studios. The remains of Cholera victims from nearby Kalkara were interred here. Nowadays it stands mostly forgotton between Fort Ricasoli and Fort Rinella (home of the Armstrong 100 ton gun).