Photography challenges
Posts published in response to photo challenges appear here
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Gallery: monochrome portraits and street shots
It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who follows this blog that I enjoy street photography and also taking more formal portrait shots of some of the people I encounter on my travels. It will also be no surprise that I enjoy playing around with editing. I especially like experimenting with monochrome, which can work well with characterful faces.
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A wander through Getsemani
Historically, Getsemani is the area of Cartagena where African slaves lived during colonial times. The Spanish had imported them (after they’d killed off most of the native population) to build their fortifications: the city walls and the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas. They were housed here, outside the city walls, away from the grand homes of the soldiers and merchants who controlled it.
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Gallery: the wheel turns and turns
Wherever I’ve been in the world I have of course found wheels. Simple cart wheels, bicycles and motorcycles, and of course cars, most of us rely on wheels to get around. Maybe wheels are yet another example of the many things that unify us, despite our cultural differences?
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Gallery: pick a word (March 2023)
For most of us photos are an integral to our memories of life’s events. How we remember them is shaped by the moments we captured. In my travel photography I am usually juggling two aims. I want to capture the ‘what’, create a documentary record of each trip. But I’m also interested in ‘how’ I record and remember it, striving to create the best images I can.
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Gallery: seeing Colombia in black and white
Colombia is one of the most colourful countries I’ve ever visited, possibly the most colourful. So it seems counter-intuitive to present it in black and white. Yet however colourful the destination there are always likely to be at least a few images that I feel merit experimentation. Ones in which form dominates the composition. Ones with strong contrasts and patterns.
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A (steep) walk in the Valle Cocora
Cocora was a princess, daughter of Acaime, chief of the local Quimbaya indigenous people. Today she lends her name to Colombia’s Cocora Valley, where the native wax palms (the national tree) grow up to 60 metres and live for about 200 years.
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Gallery: the roads I take
It’s only eighteen months since Anne asked us to define our ‘photography groove’. My answer then was travel photography, and now that John asks much the same question about our favourite style or genre, the road we most often take, my answer remains the same.
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The unique vision of Fernando Botero
You can’t really miss the unique style of Colombia’s most famous artist. Whether on canvas or in sculpture, his figures are exaggeratedly rotund. The innate humour of these people, and animals, is often offset by sharp political commentary or by pensive contemplation of his own life and family. Indeed the theme of family is central to much of his work.
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Gallery: in the pink in Colombia
A number of you seemed to enjoy seeing my Colombian orchids. Now Denzil gives me an excuse to share some more flowers from that beautiful country.
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Colombia, History, Lens-Artists, Monday walks, Photographing Public Art, Street art, Street photography
Finding peace in Medellín
How do you find peace in a city rife with crime and violence? During the 1980s and most of the 1990s Medellín had the reputation of being one of the most violent cities in the world.
