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Gallery: purple blowing my mind
Purple is the colour of wealth and royalty. Its rich tones call to mind the trappings of majesty and ceremony. Its blend of red and blue means that it lies carries messages both of tranquillity and of passion. Purple is also the colour of creativity, as it fosters creativity by stimulating our senses while also promoting the calmness needed for thoughtful observation and introspection. And it just happens to be my favourite colour too!
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Sweet freedoms in Tirana
Under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha many freedoms were denied to Albanians. Among them the freedom to travel abroad, the freedom to express dissent, and the freedom to worship. Hoxha declared that ‘the only religion of Albania is Albanianism’.
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Gallery: peeking at animals, peeking at me
Looking back I see that I have already in the past, several times, shared photos of animals’ eyes. I hate to duplicate but but I believe I’ve managed to dig out some new, and some not-yet-shared, images for this collection.
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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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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: feeding the birds of Colombia
Colombia can claim to have one fifth of the world’s birds, an amazing 1,954 species. That said, we saw relatively few of them. This may be in part because we went to the wrong places at the wrong time of year. And in part because we’re not experts and neither did we do any specific bird-watching activities.
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Gallery: blackness against the light
Silhouettes are a great way to create drama in an image. By eliminating details they evoke mystery and can be enigmatic. They take to extreme the balances in contrast that we all work with in our photography.
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Gallery: the sound of silence
How do you photograph silence? Photographing a sound seems challenging enough, being invisible; but the absence of sound even more so.
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Gallery: how many shades of grey?
Grey probably gets a bad name as a colour. We think of it as rather dull. We associate it with gloomy weather, with an absence of light and brightness. But it has its admirers. Hopefully I can demonstrate that if you look closely you will find beauty in grey.
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Gallery: taking the plunge
There are plenty of quotes that encourage us to take the plunge. We all understand the concept. Be brave, don’t hesitate, don’t hold back. We can apply this to our working lives (go for that promotion!), and our personal lives (don’t wait, travel, book that flight, train for that marathon!)
