Colourful World: Burgundy or maroon

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This week Cee’s Fun Foto challenge is Maroon/Burgundy.

In Berlin, there are some trees planted near the Reichstag (parliament building) and also along the river Spree, whose leaves turn amazing shades of red, yellow, orange and pink during autumn. They have a name but I can’t remember it, I heard it for the first time the previous autumn in Berlin. One day after work it was a sunny and mild autumn evening, so I decided on an impromptu bike ride to take a look at them. Here are some photos of the trees which had leaves in a burgundy or maroon shade.

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Weekly Photo Challenge – CrEePy

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This week’s photo challenge is Creepy. I didn’t really expect to come across anything creepy during the week, but then lo and behold, we bumped into this scary-looking wooden doll statue next a kid’s play area in a service station! I wonder how toddlers feel when they come face to face with this child-sized wickedly grinning doll and her looming shadow? I’m sure whoever painted her intended her to look quite friendly, so it shows how your imagination can transform something perfectly safe into something creepy!

Starry Skies: August One Photo Focus challenge

With all the tools for post-processing of digital photos these days, you can have a lot of fun being creative with your images. To encourage people to learn and share different post-processing techniques, a photographer named Stacey Fisher has set up a Before and After weekly event, as well as a once a One Photo Focus month event where everyone processes the same photo in a different way. The idea is not only to share the images but also some explanation of how they were derived.

This month the photo challenge was “Drawing with Light” by Katie Prior. Here is the original (made smaller for my blog):

The Cobb before right size

Continue reading

Colourful World – Apricot and Peach

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Courtyard in Alhambra, Spain

This week Cee chose the colours apricot and peach for her Fun Foto Challenge Colourful World Series. A few weeks ago, I took a photo of summer’s bounty: the bowl of apricots and plums we’d picked on J’s family’s farm in Czech. So I went back to that photo to study the shades of apricot, wondering if I’d taken any other photos that included natural shades of apricot and peach during my stay in Germany. The answer was, not many, apart from some orange-yellow flowers! Apricot and peach are shades of summer, warm colours, and this is more a land of greens and blues. Looking back at my photos, I found that these colours were more common in warmer countries: in the orange sand and rock found in some parts of South Africa and other dry countries, which turns a yellow-orange apricot shade when the sun is setting,  and the peach-coloured stone of the beautifully carved Alhambra in Spain. It has been dry this year in central Europe, and last weekend we did ride past some wheatfields which had turned an almost peach colour in the sun. Actually, a great trick to make a room appear warmer is to paint it in shades of peach or apricot, and I noticed that buildings painted in these colours still look warm in winter or on a rainy day. Here are some of the photos I found with shades of apricot and peach. Continue reading

Weekly Photo Challenge – Close up

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This Week’s photo challenge theme is Close up. We were in the Czech republic this weekend, and I enjoyed taking photos of the bees and butterflies busy at work in one of my favourite flowers, Echinacea purpurea. Even with cellphones these days you can take close-ups, although obviously it’d be better to have a proper camera with a nice macro lens to get a sharper focus and finer details. This photo was taken with a Nexus 5 cellphone. The hard part was getting the insects to sit still! Here are some more photos of the bugs’ world. Continue reading

Colourful World: Turquoise and Teal

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge focuses on Turquoise and Teal this time around.  The shades formed by  the colours blue and green combined are probably my favourite of the colour spectrum. Here are just a couple of photos from a brightly painted bridge near Eberswalder in Germany, a dragonfly at Liepnitzsee (in Brandenburg, north of Berlin), the beautiful green-blue waters of Liepnitzsee itself, and the crystal clear aquamarine waters of the Julian Alps in Slovenia (the colour is apparently caused by glacial powder). Till next time!

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Weekly photo challenge: Half and Half – in Ireland

The theme of this week’s photo challenge is Half and Half. The idea is to share a photo that has two halves, either literally or figuratively.

“This week, share an image that has two clear halves, literally or figuratively. You could focus on composition, like me, and take a photo with an explicit dividing line (either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal). Or take the theme in other directions: zoom in on a pair of objects that together form a whole. Show two people whose demeanor or personality complement each other. Or bring into balance two opposing visual elements — light and dark, color and its absence, sharp focus juxtaposed with blurriness.” – Ben Huberman

i wanted to (and might still) search through my photos for some other interesting takes on half and half, but the first thing that sprung to mind was some photos I took in Ireland. Ireland is, indeed, the emerald isle. How could it not be with all that rain? I found it a beautiful and dramatic landscape, with many rolling green hills and open expanses of sky filled with dramatic clouds, as well as cliffs overlooking the deep blue Atlantic ocean. The division between land and sky became a recurrent theme in the photos I took there, and turned out to be my favourite from the trip. So for my half and half I choose Earth and Sky.

By the way  – there is no photoshopping at all here – Ireland really is that green!

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Traditional Irish blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face;

the rains fall soft upon your fields,

and till we meet again,

may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

 

 

Weekly Photo Challenge – Door

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Door on church in Prague, Czech Republic

This week’s photo challenge theme was Door.

I was looking for one photo of a door in particular, but it’s an old photo and my photos are on various hard drives both in Berlin and South Africa, so I couldn’t find it. But on browsing some very old photos (taken with a very old point and shoot camera) I realized that a) I really have a lot of photos of doors and b) there is a remarkable variety of styles of door. So here are some photos of some doors around the world (click on the photos to view them larger).

Doors in Greece

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Colourful doors in Mexico

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Doors of Asia (Japan, Malaysia, Thailand)

Doors that echo the structure of the building (Thailand, Italy)

Doors that blend in with nature (Japan)

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Arabic doors (mosque in Malaysia)

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Doors of Portugal (Lisbon)

Old and ancient doors (Vietnam, Ireland, Turkey, Greece)

Doors to the underworld (Turkey, Greece)

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Weekly Photo Challenge – Muse

Since I love taking photos (and looking at other people’s photos!), I thought I’d join the Weekly Photo Challenge. This week the topic is “Muse”: what subject frequently inspires you to take out your camera?  For me, my muse is Nature, and especially flowers. I really can’t walk past a good flower specimen without reaching for my camera! Insects and other animals also inspire me. This is one of my favourite flower photos, a poppy, taken at the beginning of summer 2013 in Brandenburg, Germany.

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