Photography and Writing
Two-and-a-half hours or so by high-speed train, through rugged country and farmland, brought us to the city of Sevilla, where the temperature was 36 Celsius and the sun was infernally burning deep into the old stone plazas and narrow lanes of the touristy but beautiful quarter of Santa Cruz where, after casting about with increasing […]
Madrid is a cosmopolitan capital, a seat of empire, replete with boulevards, fountains, museums, palaces – and of course more cathedrals and churches per square mile than the British have pubs. It is also a city of narrow, crooked streets, bars, restaurants, whole stores dedicated to jamon, turron and other delicacies and treats, a city […]
A traveller visiting Spain for the first – or second – time is spoiled for choice. From Madrid, where we spent four days, and could easily have spent more, Rob and I took the high-speed train south, to Sevilla, where we picked up a car and drove on to Ronda and the pueblos blancos. From […]
From photographs of birds, taken during my recent field trip to the Marievale Bird Sanctuary, this blog will see a change of scene, to our travels in Spain – but only when we are back, Rob and I, towards the end of September, from Andalucia and Madrid. Meanwhile here is one image – a blacksmith […]
This Pied Kingfisher was hard at work when I came across him, rising from a bed of reeds, hovering, swivelling his head this way and that, wings beating madly as he looked for his dinner. I took a million photographs, the first lot using a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion, and then a […]
These little chicks are coot, you might say. I saw them, on the vlei at Marievale, far out on the water, at the furthest reach of my 500mm telephoto, and even then I had to crop the images severely. The teeniest chicks, interestingly, were the furthest out – mere orange-beaked fluff, beside the black hulls […]
Here’s a good one. A prisoner in a Turkish prison goes to the prison library, and asks for a particular book. The prison librarian replies, ‘We don’t have that book. But we do have the author.’ Signs of the times, you might say – the modern dystopia. History has not ended – in fact, it’s […]
From the corner of the hide, you looked out across the water, directly into the light, where the coots were squabbling and giving chase, and I knew at once that this was an image made for black-and-white. I took several photographs, aware of how tricky the light was, and struggling with the heavy lens to […]
The world I was born into was analogue. That meant film: in my case, mostly Kodak Tri-X, or Ilford FP4. Tri-X for when you wanted to “push” the film speed, where the light was low, or where you wanted a contrasty, journalistic effect or – I shall come back to this in a moment – […]