Here’s another dock on Lake Atitlan. This one was pretty flimsy, I had to find a moment when people weren’t walking on it to take this photo as my camera was bouncing up and down when people walked back and forth.
On my boat trip around the lake, my last stop was ARCAS, a center for trafficked wild animals. While there I met some, a parrot that says “hola” and two baby jaguars.
I also took what felt like my first good photo of the trip, of a sunken launch off their dock. There was an Australian girl there fishing to feed an otter they’d just gotten in who said that the boat got damaged and they couldn’t afford to fix it so they sank it there.
Following a grueling, but short, hike up to a viewpoint overlooking Lake Peten Itza and the island city of Flores we marched back down to our launch to continue onto the beach. It was hot and I was looking forward to getting back to my bottle of water under the shade of the launch. But, before I could do that I decided to stop for a photo of these two launches, as they waited patiently for their passengers. Mine was the smaller one on the right.
On my first day in Flores I planned on taking it easy. I was going to sleep in and then take a tour of the lake. Little did I know that I’d wake up at 6am and not be able to get back to sleep because my room was absolutely boiling!
I lay around for about an hour before giving up and going for breakfast in my hostel. Then, it was time to do something. I grabbed my backpack full of camera gear and made my way down to the docks to procure a boat for the day. When I arrived at the water there weren’t any boats about. Then, a kid was passing by and called out to me. Stretching my Spanish abilities to the limit, I arranged a price to visit two viewpoints, a beach, and an animal refuge center called ARCAS.
As we sped out of Flores I snapped the below photo of my new guide.
On my first night in Iceland I stayed out, excited by the lack of darkness, until I got too cold to go any further. On my way back to our guesthouse I decided to stop and take some more photos of the flowers moving around in the biting wind. I wanted to show the flowers’ movement so I stuck with a small aperture to let them blur and fired off 7 exposures ranging from -3 to +3.
I’ve been trying to avoid posting images from the same place day after day. However, I’ve realised that I’ve got far more pictures from Iceland than anywhere else, and I won’t get to do anymore traveling until the New Year. So you’ll be seeing a lot of Iceland photos for the next couple of months.
Today’s photo is another shot from Lake Como with a sailboat dwarfed by the surrounding mountains that rise, almost vertically, from the water’s surface. Can’t write much tonight as I need to get packing. I’m off to the Bahamas tomorrow for a meeting then taking a few days off in Florida. Don’t have a big enough bag to take all my camera gear at the moment so have some tricky decisions to make.
This is the first photo I took in Iceland. My flight was scheduled to get in at midnight and was delayed by half an hour. It was torture as we approached because I could see the sun was setting. I knew it would be light all night, but the sunset was incredible. It felt like it took forever to get through immigration, get my bag and make my way to the guesthouse. I didn’t spend long in the room as I quickly broke out my gear and took off… successfully leaving my tripod in the room. Fortunately my travel buddy offered to run back and get it while I looked for a shot. I think it was technically sunrise when I took this shot and the color had died down a bit. As you can see it was really windy. Rather than trying to freeze the flowers (which may have been impossible) I decided to increase my f-stop and let them get as blurry as possible.
We’d turned the canoe sideways and were drifting down the Zambezi as I photographed a huge group of elephants taking a refreshing dip. I had my big lens on… 70-300mm. I started out fully zoomed in and was gradually zooming out as we got closer. Suddenly, I couldn’t zoom out any further. I dropped the camera from my eye. We were VERY close to these elephants. Then I heard Chris’s voice from the back of the canoe, “Keep taking photos J. I got this.”
I kept taking photos.