While travelling is always a wonderful treat, part of the pleasure lies in having the memories of the sights seen and experiences lived to look back on later. And the photos of course; always photos! At the end of the past few years, I’ve enjoyed compiling a summary of my travels, so here is this year’s version.
-
-
If you love travelling as much as I do, I’m sure there are times when you read a post about somewhere interesting, maybe somewhere you’re already planning to go, and you think, ‘That will be useful’. Maybe you even bookmark it, or copy and saved some of the useful information. And just maybe, you remember, when the time comes to visit that place, that you read and saved that interesting post … somewhere!
-
For several years now I have longed to visit Svalbard. A land where the sun never sets in summer, nor rises in winter. A land 60% covered with glaciers and home to exciting wildlife such as polar bears and walrus. And finally this year I made it.
-
The smallest things can trigger a memory: a song, a scent, a throwaway remark. Yesterday, for me, it was a single word, a place name: Monneville. Very many moons ago, in my teens, I spent about ten days living in Monneville as a pupil on my school’s French Exchange programme.
-
Is resilience something we are born with, or can it be developed? The answer seems to be, a bit of both. We all have an innate level of resilience, but our attitude to life and the knocks we receive along the way can strengthen or decrease it. Perhaps surprisingly, many people who have faced the toughest challenges demonstrate the highest levels of resilience; they have needed to.
-
Travel is a luxury, one not everyone can indulge in. Those of us who have the resources and health to be able to indulge have a responsibility, I feel, to value the experiences it brings us. One way I try to do this is by capturing those experiences through my photography and through this blog.
-
The people who live in some houses do literally ‘live in colour’. Blues, pinks, yellows, reds – or even all of them at once! While we do have some cheerfully painted houses in the UK, they tend to be the exception, and even then, pastel colours are usually preferred over brights. But in other parts of the world, it seems, the brighter the better.
-
Photography is all about contrasts of course. Without those variations in lightness and darkness our images would be dull and flat. Whether contrasting black and white in monochrome shots, or harmonising and contrasting the shades in our colour shots, effective contrast is key to a good result. But the term can also relate to our choice of subject matter.
-
In a foreign country the everyday can seem unfamiliar. Different food, different customs, different houses, different ways of dressing and moving around. Sometimes the most familiar sights are the famous ones. We’ve already seen them so many times in films, on TV and on other people’s photos that we think we know them already.
-
Of course, not everyone can travel and certainly not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to travel as much as we do. I wouldn’t want you to think that I don’t realise and appreciate that. But if you are in a position to travel, it would be such a shame not to do so.
