Category Archives: Photography

Weekly Photo Challenge: Free Spirit

By Vladimir Brezina

This week’s Photo Challenge is Free Spirit.

A frigate bird soaring above the palms at sunset…

Belize, 2010. More photos are here.

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Travel Theme: Curves

By Vladimir Brezina

Ailsa‘s Travel-Themed Photo Challenge this week is Curves.

Here are some of the curves of New York Harbor.

Capture the Colour

By Vladimir Brezina

The travel site TravelSupermarket is running a contest to Capture the Colour.

They say a picture paints a thousand words. Well, rather than asking you to write a five thousand word blog post, we’re inviting you to produce a blog post with up to 5 photos that really do ‘Capture the Colour’… the 5 colours Blue, Green, Yellow, White and Red.”

We’ve been nominated to take part by Autumn in Bruges and also by Untitled Adventure. Thanks so much to both, and do check out their wonderful colors at the foregoing links!

Here are our five colors:

Blue

Blue twilight closes in on the frozen Central Park Reservoir in New York City, while on the other side the ramparts of the Upper East Side still reflect the last afterglow of the sunset. February 8, 2010. A few more photos from that day are here.

Green

We passed this metal recycling facility while kayaking along the Bronx River in New York City on July 2, 2011. Who says that industrial equipment can’t be brilliantly colored, apparently just for the fun of it? Apart from this vivid green, we saw some wonderful reds and blues. More photos are here, and the story of our trip is here.

Update, September 3, 2012: Michel, the founder of TravelNotes.org, has included this photo among his best 11 Green photos!

Yellow

Heavy snowfall in New York City’s Central Park on January 27, 2011. The photographers were out in force, photographing ducks congregating around the last patch of unfrozen pond water. Against the pristine white snow, the ducks stood out in brilliant colors. As did some of the photographers! A vivid reminder why yellow is a good color to wear if you want to be noticed… More photos are here.

White

With a tasty morsel in its beak, an egret stands out brilliantly white in the late afternoon light. This was one of many birds that I photographed over a few days in February 2012 while kayaking along the mangrove shorelines of the St. Petersburg area of Florida. Some other bird photos from that trip are here, here, here, and here.

Red

Red is the color of many powerful things, including things infernal. Here is an adorable little devil, on Halloween 2011 on the Upper East Side of New York City. More photos are here, and the story is here.

And now we nominate, in turn, five other bloggers whose photos we much admire (and who, as far as we can tell, haven’t been nominated already) to “Capture the Colour”:

We’d love to see their colors!

(Unfortunately, the contest has a deadline of August 29, 2012—only two days from now. Sorry about the late notice!)

Weekly Photo Challenge: Urban

By Vladimir Brezina

This week’s Photo Challenge is Urban.

Two views down the street…

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Travel Theme: Silhouette

By Vladimir Brezina

Ailsa‘s Travel-Themed Photo Challenge for this week is Silhouette.

She says: “It fascinates me how a silhouette; a two-dimensional outline of a person or object, can suggest a story just as clearly as if you could see the scene in its entirety. Perhaps it makes our imagination work overtime, trying to fill in the details we cannot see.”

Indeed…

Belize, 2010. More photos are here.

Travel Theme: Sunset

By Vladimir Brezina

Ailsa‘s Travel-Themed Photo Challenge this week is Sunset.

I must have hundreds of sunset photos, since, with camera in hand, a spectacular show at sunset is hard to resist… Which to choose? Here are a few of the memorable sunsets over the years.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Merge, Take Two

By Vladimir Brezina

This week’s Photo Challenge is Merge. I’ve already posted one interpretation, but here’s another one.

One some days, you don’t know where the sea ends and the sky begins…

More photos are here.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Merge

By Vladimir Brezina

This week’s Photo Challenge is Merge.

Blossoms and stone merge in spring…

Spring 2007 in Central Park, New York City. More photos are here.

A second interpretation of “Merge” is here.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Wrong

By Vladimir Brezina

This week’s Photo Challenge is Wrong.

Stand up paddle boarding is becoming very popular. There’s the right way to do it…

… and the wrong way.

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More photos are here.

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Travel Theme: Signs

By Vladimir Brezina

Ailsa‘s Travel-Themed Photo Challenge for this week is Signs.

We travel around by kayak. So, you wouldn’t think we would run into too many signs. But we do!

Scylla and Charybdis
……..Some years ago, Erik Baard and I paddled down from Manhattan and landed on the beach near the northwestern tip of Sandy Hook. We had a leisurely lunch, took a stroll along the beach, lazed about, and after a couple of hours were ready to paddle back to Manhattan. But just before we launched, we thought that we might, just out of curiosity, find out what those two big signs that stood there, facing away from us, said…

In the meantime, on the opposite, eastern side of Sandy Hook, there is another set of signs…

Bitter Sweet Heaven
……..In January, an aborted kayak trip left us wandering through the streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn, aliens in our drysuits, observing the earthlings and their strange signs…

Read the full story here.

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Judgment Day
……..Last year, Johna and I were kayaking down the Hudson from Albany to New York City. Several days into the trip, we saw this sign promising, for the next day, devastating earthquakes that would usher in the Rapture… We hoped it wouldn’t disrupt our trip too much. But we were certainly glad to be out of New York City during this event. Traffic was bound to be terrible…