My very first hummingbird photo in Costa Rica. This is five separate humming bird photos blended together in Photoshop.
I was familiar with many great nature photos taken in Costa Rica, so I jumped at the chance to go for a couple weeks with a good friend of mine on an organized nature photography workshop. We photographed endless hummingbirds, frogs, toucans, bats and vultures. Most of it in a torrent of daily rainstorms. Thank goodness we went in the dry season.
Nanortalik, Greenland Field of Dreams
Greenland villages are small by any standard. The largest town in Greenland, the largest island on earth, has less than 20,000 inhabitants. Nanortalik has about 1,100 people making it the eleventh largest town on the island. So I was wondering what is the eleventh largest city in the US? If you go strictly by incorporated city limits, it is Austin, Texas. If you include the primary statistical area it is the Miami, Fort Lauderdale area with over six million residents.
For some reason, homes in coastal towns are often painted in colorful pastel colors. Weymouth, England is no exception.
Our method of exploration of these coastal towns generally consisted of shopping for something we apparently feel we needed or forgot to pack, like warmer clothes. We then search for a lunch spot in town to sample the local cuisine. Indian food is very good across the UK, so that was often at the top of our list. The local seafood was also good to find. However, please note there is no Dover sole to be found in Dover, England. No matter how good the food is on board, local cuisine away from the ship is a very welcome change.
Bee on a Cone Flower
I’ve been exploring macro photography as an alternative to following the crowd and photographing landscapes, beautiful sunsets, sunrises and iconic locations. Continue reading
rose petals
Flower vendors are a common sight in Quito, Ecuador. Flowers do not seem to be a luxury item or relegated to only special occasions. Old, young and the not-so-well-to-do could be seen carrying two dozen roses back home on Saturday morning. Continue reading
Turrets on a Bucharest Orthodox church
We normally drive or take the train while traveling in Europe. However, European travel restrictions (Schengen Agreement) dictated we get out of Spain as well as twenty-five other European countries and head for a country not part of this agreement. We would be illegal aliens if we remained in Spain. So we boarded our first ever European flight from Barcelona to Bucharest.
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Flamenco Triptic
Malaga, Spain is not terribly different from some of the other towns we had already visited over the last 30 days. We thoroughly enjoyed our visit, but we have explored some of these activities before.
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The Road to Hana is a popular must-do attraction for many visitors to the island of Maui. Guidebooks and audio tapes are available with descriptions of places to visit along the way, pinpointed by mile markers. This is quite confusing as the mile markers start over three times along this 12 hour route. Some tourists display the ‘Aloha’ spirit and take their time crossing the 50+ narrow one-way bridges, and navigating the twists and turns. Others are in the rush-rush mode, making the trip to Hana memorable and challenging in numerous ways.
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Our most northern stop in the UK was Inverness, Scotland. There was nothing specific from a photographic or tourism viewpoint that brought us here. We used Inverness as a base to drive even further north into the Highlands and dine in the town of Tongue. Of course we also wanted to explore Loch Ness as another one of those tourist ‘must-see’ places. The above photo was taken from a lunch spot we discovered on the much less touristy east side of Loch Ness. On the west side, restaurants seem to be around every curve in the road, but on this side, we were just about to give up on finding any restaurant when we found a real gem with the view above.
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For some unknown reason we only scheduled four days in the beautiful Isle of Skye, yet an entire week was spent in Edinburgh and a week in York. This planning was a bit backwards in hindsight. Much more time could have been spent in this stunning island countryside. The one day available to hike to the beautiful and unique Old Man of Storr provided only very dumpy light (photography speak), so I turned around and explored other parts of the island rather than devote an entire day to a single spot. The Old Man of Storr is the monolith in the distant background of the lead photo above.
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