Often I observe some with a phone or camera taking a single photo of a sight and moving on, in a hurry to reach the next. In the pre-digital days when every picture taken meant a hit to your wallet, that made some sense. Today it strikes me as strange, but then I am rarely happy with my first shot of anything!
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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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According to Horace, 'A picture is a poem without words'. That would seem to be a good motto for a photography blog. But I like to write (and talk!) almost as much as I like to take photos. So my posts are usually a mix of the two, and I leave my readers to decide whether the pictures or the text say the most.
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Bulgaria’s capital city intrigues and charms me. It seems to be in a state of constant flux, built on layers of history. One minute you are walking on a Roman road, the next staring up at 1950s Stalinist monoliths. Gold-domed cathedrals and churches dominate the vistas along wide boulevards while in side streets elegant villas sit side-by-side with their crumbling, neglected cousins.
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There is a theme emerging in these monthly round-ups, a theme of bookends! I’ve already pointed out that while July was bookended by happy gatherings of family and friends, August was similarly bookended with funerals. And now we come to September and we are back to happier bookends: city breaks.
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Isn’t every outing with a camera a kind of treasure hunt? Looking all around you as you walk/drive/ride for any opportunity to take a photo, just as a treasure hunter is alert to any sign that what they seek lies just underfoot.
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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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Is it ever OK to be late? It’s something I try my very best to avoid, but occasionally it can be a good thing, as in the case of Boris III of Bulgaria. This is the Hagia Nedelja church. The previous church on this spot was destroyed in a terrorist plot in 1925 to assassinate the king, Boris III. He was attending the funeral service of General Konstantin Georgiev, who had been killed in an assault two days previously, on 14 April of that year. The group from the Bulgarian Communist Party knew that in killing such a high powered…
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On a small island in the Mekong River in southern Laos, Done Deng, lies the village of Ban Houa Done Deng. The name means 'village of the head of Done Deng' as it lies at the northern tip of the island. The villagers benefit from the financial support of the nearby hotel, La Folie, which has enabled a school to be built here.
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We talk about someone we consider to be too old as being ‘over the hill’, but who decides how old is too old? Do we too easily dismiss the elderly among us as being past it? Do we fail to recognise that their journeys up that hill may mean that they have a lot to teach us about the paths that we too must follow?
