Speaking figuratively, Sofia is not a black and white city. Its history is too complex, its architectural influences too diverse. But like any city it lends itself to black and white photography.
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It’s no secret that I am a big fan of street art. I don’t mean scrawled graffiti, or even more precisely worked ‘tags’. I mean art. Like many cities today, Sofia offers a dedicated street art tour; we saw signs advertising it in several places. But we chose not to take the tour, instead preferring to seek out street art at our own pace.
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If you want to understand the people of a city a great place to start is in one of their parks. Seeing them relaxing, at play, you can appreciate not how different they are from you but how similar.
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I never tire of wandering the streets of Paris; there is always so much to see and to photograph. From elegant buildings to quirky details and of course plenty of street art.
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Paris, like most cities, is full of colour. Street art, flower markets, shop windows, mellow old stone, green (or autumnal) trees … I could go on. But it is also full of striking details that translate well to monochrome images.
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Jean Cocteau said that, 'In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator'. I disagree. For me, there are few more pleasurable ways to pass the time in Paris than sitting on the terrace of a pavement café watching the world pass by.
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You must have been living on Mars, or as a hermit, not to have heard that Queen Elizabeth II passed away last week. Here in the UK we are in a period of official mourning such as most of us have never experienced. Whether you are a fervent monarchist, staunch republican or (like me) somewhere on a scale between those two extremes, it’s hard not to be fascinated by the sense of history that surrounds us right now.
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We only occasionally get the chance to watch a street artist at work. Somehow these works of art seem to appear almost magically on our streets, created perhaps overnight while we sleep? Some of course take many hours, even days, to complete. But others are much simpler and while they may have less impact still brighten our day.
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How many windows is too many? That was the question facing many seventeenth century property owners. In 1696 a window tax was introduced in England and Wales. The more windows a building had, the more its owner had to pay.
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Around a 450 year old fort on the edge of the Thar Desert a small town has grown up, consisting of little more than a market, some shops and a bus station. These serve the surrounding rural community and those who work in the fort, which is today is both home to the Thakurs, former rulers of the Kingdom of Khimsar, who built it, and also a heritage hotel.
