Here’s another shot of Godafoss, taken from the bank opposite the bustling parking lot full of tour buses and tourists snapping away frantically before moving on to their next destination. The scene opposite was the exact opposite of the serenity offered by this bank.
Here’s the first of my photos from my most recent trip to Cape Town. This is on a beautiful, rugged beach in Scarborough. There were a lot of kids playing and swimming here. After dipping my toe in I decided it was far too cold for my liking!
This is one of the essential tourist stops in Bermuda. Located not far from Horseshoe Bay, from the top of this lighthouse, you can see most of the island. I like to stand up there and look out across the Sound and Hamilton Harbor on a calm day.
Today’s photo is of Detifoss, the most powerful waterfall in Iceland, and I’m stood right on the edge. I’ve talked about my fear of heights before on this blog, while photographing the Victoria Falls in Zambia. For some reason, I managed to avoid getting too worked up at this one. My travel buddy on the other hand had a bit of an episode. I didn’t realize it at the time, but she’d frozen right on the cliff edge a bit further down the gorge while I was taking the photo at the end of this post. Apparently she had to talk herself back to sanity and then crawled her way up to safety. She did manage to snap this photo of me just before I descended to get good and close to the torrent though:
I feel kind of bad for not realizing that my travel buddy was in a bit of distress, but I’m pretty sure she’ll agree that this photo was worth it:
We came to this bridge and as it wrapped around us, I decided I wanted to try and capture that, so I called for my driver to reverse. We could see a car coming up the single lane road behind us, but it was a distance away. You find you can see cars on the same road as you from a long way away in Iceland pretty often. Still, I felt the pressure as we were blocking the road. So much so, that I took this photo barefoot. The road was freezing. I don’t think I stopped hopping from foot to foot the whole time.
I’ve moved onto a new, larger external hard drive for storing my photographs. So, I went through all the photos I had left to process and moved them over to the new one prior to flying out to Africa. I was sure I’d processed all the Prague photos I was going to process but decided to take a look anyway. Then, I found this one. It won’t have made the cut originally because I was focused on trying to capture Prague with minimal people. Upon looking at this photo again, I decided I kind of liked it. The sky is beautiful and it doesn’t look so crowded as to be uncomfortable (which it can be sometimes). So, I thought it might be nice to show just how lively Prague actually is.
I’ve made it to Cape Town with sanity almost intact! I managed about 2 hours sleep on my first overnight flight from London to Bermuda. It was a dreary overcast day in London, just as expected. I summoned up the energy to spend a couple of hours taking photos, despite the rain. Following that I met up with a few friends from London I haven’t seen in a long time, and a couple of friends from Bermuda who I see all the time.
I set out for Heathrow Airport a bit later than I should have. It turns out that the Heathrow Express doesn’t run quite as often as the Gatwick Express. I wasn’t too late for the flight, but didn’t manage to pickup a few bits and pieces I wanted, like extra camera batteries, but I can get on fine without any of it.
The next flight was a long one, 11 hours. I really expected to crash out and sleep through most of it. Unfortunately I woke up about 5 hours before landing feeling refreshed! The last time I did this flight I’d had quite a lot to drink, so did manage to sleep through the whole thing, despite waking up briefly and discovering I was hungover. I spent about 4 hours on this one, watching movies, sat in the darkness, surrounded by sleeping people. I did reach a point where all I could think was please turn on the lights and people start moving around, I’m going insane.
Following that I had one last hop, from Johannesburg to Cape Town. A two hour flight with hardly anyone on the plane. I might as well have had someone book a private jet instead of this. I succeeded in sleeping through that one nicely!
Today’s photo is from my wander around London, I think I’ve got about 5 good pictures out of it, mostly of Tower Bridge. I was trying to find a way to create an image of the bridge that was more interesting than just a photo of the bridge. I fired off a lot of frames, and got lucky with this nicely blurred double-decker bus. In my mind I just wanted to catch the bus on the bridge, I was pleasantly surprised when my +2 exposure came out with the bus looking like this!
I don’t know what this is, but it looks pretty cool. We encountered this on our trip to see seals in the Northern region of Iceland. Just below the cliff there’s a beach. Just off the beach is a sand bar that a seal colony calls home. I took this shot on my way back, while waiting for my travel buddy to catch up.
Oh yeah, Happy New Year!!
I’ve had this idea for a little while of Macro Mondays. The problem is I haven’t been taking very many macro shots… they’re pretty fidgety and I really need to get a flash to pull it off properly! So, I’m not officially rolling out macro Mondays, but I took today’s photo with my macro lens and it’s Monday.
This was taken in a small pond in the Sensory Garden of the Botanical Gardens right next to my house. I don’t think I really got close enough to call it macro, but it’s pretty cool just the same.
My bags are actually all packed now, clothes and everything! I fly out in about 5 hours for London, where I hope to spend the day running around taking photos before meeting up with some old uni friends, and maybe current Bermuda friends, for lunch and maybe a pint or two. Packing for three weeks in Africa and one day in London is pretty tricky. We’re going to be traveling on a budget, so there will be lots of buses and trains and I had to keep my baggage to a minimum. My camera backpack is big enough on it’s own, not to mention whatever mammoth bag my travel buddy will be bringing, so I can’t bring too much else. As a result I’ve decided to forgo a proper jacket and I’m going with the layering concept. I’ll be wearing a long sleeved t-shirt, my trusty fleece and rain jacket. I’m pretty doubtful that this will do the trick when I’m out trying to take photos, so I’ve also packed some old thermals just in case. Oh yeah, and it’s supposed to rain all morning tomorrow. Hopefully it will be the typical English light rain, because if it’s pissing it down I’ll have a lot of time to kill with nothing to do!
I meant to get this out before Christmas, but as you are aware I got a bit lazy moving into the festive season. I figure it’s still okay so long as it’s out before New Years, right?
