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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!)
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My travel year in review, 2022
All of us who love to travel, and are fortunate enough to be able to do so, will I hope be looking back on a year filled with both familiar and foreign places. For most of us, 2022 was the year in which we began to feel comfortable travelling again. When, despite a few new forms to fill in and masks to be worn, perhaps reluctantly, on planes, the world opened up again and we could scratch that travel itch, relieve that homesickness ‘for the places we have never known’.
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Gallery: feeling the blues, again
Some time ago I shared some favourite ‘blue’ images, accompanied by a quote from a favourite Blue song. But the world has an inexhaustible supply of shades of blue. So I’ve trawled through the photos from recent trips, and some older ones, to see what blues I could find that haven’t been shared before.
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Ealing, the Queen of the Suburbs?
In 1902 Charles Jones, Ealing’s borough surveyor, published a book. In it he referred to Ealing as the ‘Queen of Suburbs’. His aim of course was to promote the area as a place to live.
