Favorite pictures
Take a look at the selection of my favorite shots from around the world and click through to my extensive galleries on Flickr.
Chasing World Heritage: #102 (Giant’s Causeway)
I had an unexpected extra free day in Dublin. The weather was gorgeous – spring at its best. By all rights, I should have been exploring the city with my camera. Instead, obsessed World Heritage chaser that I am, I got into a car and drove half the island of Eire to see a unique
Memorable shots: Orava Castle
Wayne Gretzky famously said, You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. He meant hockey, of course, but this adage is wholly applicable to photography. Sometimes a shot taken under conditions where no one can expect a good result comes out pretty well. But it is given a chance to come out well only
A place in my memory: Quebec City
My predilection for landmark photography notwithstanding, I take a fair number of “picturesque detail” shots. They rarely end up among my favorites, precisely because they tend not to clearly associate with a specific place and therefore rarely support a specific memory. But this colorful picture taken in Quartier Petit-Champlain in Quebec City recalls the wonderful
Memorable shots: Torbjørnskjer
This picture is of a small island of Torbjørnskjer near the mouth of Oslofjord where it joins with the North Sea. It represents a departure from my usual style of photo-processing. Taken at dawn from windswept upper deck of the overnight Copenhagen-Oslo ferry, it looked unremarkable in its original form. But softening the focus, along
A place in my memory: Edinburgh
I have reached the end of the stream of photographs from my most recent expeditions, which means that I will be picking up again the loose series of memorable travel shots from my past journeys. There are over a hundred of them in the Lightroom collection that I set aside for this purpose, so you
Linz, Austria
I focused on Vienna and its Christmas markets on my recent trip to Austria, but also took day-trips to explore Graz and Semmering Railway. I also spent a day in Linz, which was probably a bit of an overkill for the overall trip. Don’t get me wrong – Linz is a pretty and pleasant town,
Vienna
I ended my favorite sights vignette of Vienna several years ago with a promise to take hundreds of pictures on my next trip to the city. Such trip came about recently – and I fulfilled that promise to a certain degree. I now have a reasonable amount of good shots from the Austrian capital. And
Chasing World Heritage: #101 (Graz)
Graz’s recognition on the World Heritage list is primarily due to the treasure trove of its architecture in the historic center. It is literally one of those towns whose streets you want to explore over and over again. I started my acquaintance with the town at Schloss Eggenberg, located some distance from the center but
Chasing World Heritage: #100 (Semmering Railway)
Recognized as a masterpiece of civil engineering, Semmering Railway is a 41-km-long stretch of tracks across Alpine landscape. I ended up traversing it twice in both directions on my recent trip to Austria. The way from Vienna to Graz lies over the same tracks, with the speedy train only slowing down on the most challenging
Chasing World Heritage: #99 (Schönbrunn)
Schönbrunn Palace and Gardens, on the World Heritage list as an outstanding example of Baroque architecture and design, should have been #40 on my chronological tracker of visited sites. On the first visit to Vienna, in 2005, it was initially part of the itinerary. But after spending a day exploring all that Alte Burg could
Madrid
You probably recall that I went to Madrid in late October for the expressed purpose of seeing a football match. Of course, I could not miss an opportunity to improve my collection of Madrid photos. So, I walked around the city and looked in to a number of major points of interest. I’ll start not
State of Travel 2016
For a good half of the last year, it looked as if it would be hopelessly behind its predecessor in terms of travel accomplished for its duration. My first trip of any kind took place only in late July. But a flurry of travel activity from October to December meant that I actually used every single day
Re-visiting favorite places: Toledo
It took three visits to Toledo for me to finally gather a reasonable portfolio of shots of this wonderful town (my limited World Heritage feature is found here). And the town is more than deserving dedicated photographic efforts. It is full of narrow sloping street such as these… …small shaded squares such as these… …and
Chasing World Heritage: #98 (Alcalá de Henares)
University town of Alcalá de Henares is recognized on the World Heritage registry for being the first such planned town and a model for subsequent others. As is often the case with so recognized locales, it is cute and lively without having any knockout features: just a really nice place to be. Here is one of
Christmas markets in Vienna
What is so special about Christmas markets, one would reasonably ask, that an otherwise rational man would travel across six time zones and brave freezing weather for a whole week just to see them. Don’t they mean crowds and trinkets, for which aforementioned rational man has no particular affection? Don’t they huddle in front of
Back from Vienna
So I spent another week abroad. This time I went to Vienna, a city that I count among my favorites despite the fact that I had only been there once before, over a decade ago. The foremost goal of the trip was to explore Christmas markets, which parts of former German and Austrian empires do
A quick tour of San Francisco
We tacked a few hours of San Francisco sightseeing at the beginning of our recent trip to the California wine country. That time is hardly sufficient to explore anything in depth, but as this was not our first visit to the city – just a first one in many years – we were able to
Around Sonoma Valley wineries
In addition to spending time in Napa, we also explored its less glamorous neighbor Sonoma. There are decidedly fewer people, lower wine-tasting expenses (including a couple of places that offer complimentary tastings), but also more muted scenery. The latter was not aided by the fact that the weather turned drab on the day we drove
Around Napa Valley wineries
The law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly when you hop from one wine tasting to another and, like me, never use the spitoon unless you actively dislike the wine that you are tasting. After a couple of flights, distinguishing characteristics of any given wine become nearly impossible to recognize. Photographic pursuits are not