Posts Tagged ‘sunset’

Gallery of India Photos Posted

With this post, I would like to present you with a brand new gallery of photos, this time from India. Most of them come from Rajasthan whose oversized hill forts tower over bustling cities that overwhelm the senses. A few, like the one below, come from just outside the province, in or near Agra.

Click here to see the full gallery of photos of India.

Below is, of course, the Taj Mahal as viewed at sundown from across the Yamuna river.

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Agra’s Taj Mahal at sunset as viewed from the north across the Yamuna River at Mehtab Bagh.


Blue Mosque, Yellow Light

Photo of the Day

Yesterday, I arrived home from a week in Istanbul, Turkey. This was my second trip to this magical city and I was happy to have more than a couple days to see some of its history and culture.

I’m currently enjoying the comforts of home, but only for a few days. I soon head out to Jordan for two weeks where more spectacular sights await. After that, I should have plenty of photo processing to keep me busy.

In this photo, evening sun breaks through the clouds over the Blue Mosque, one of the city’s architectural wonders.

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Evening sun breaks through the clouds over the Blue Mosque, one of the city's architectural wonders.


Over Eilean Donan Castle

Photo of the Day

I’ve recently returned from another great week in Scotland. They all seem to be great, but this one even had the weather contributing to the quality of life. Sunny skies have browned my arms while hiking through gorgeous glens, trekking up and down hills overlooking lochs and castle, and spotting just about every bit of wildlife that the UK seems to have on offer.

One of those lochs and castles visited was the magical Eilean Donan on Loch Duich. It’s one of my favourite places in the world and I keep hoping I get to be in its neighbourhood every time I go up to Scotland.

For today’s photo of the day, I embarked on a little trek that quickly got a lot longer than anticipated when I was struggling to get the view I wanted. Driving up the tiny country road that provides views above the castle wasn’t quite good enough for me, but I couldn’t find an accessible path up to the hills. A couple miles of driving, a hefty climb, and then a couple of miles traversing steep slopes back to almost where I had started and I wound up in the spot I wanted just as the sun was descending.

The result is below showing the sun touching the mountains in the west while the colours sweep across the panorama of the lochs and castle below.

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Grand Canal Sunset

Photo of the Day

Today’s photo of the day is another one from magical Venice. My full gallery of photos of Venice is now available for your viewing pleasure.

For this image below, I snuck through one of the narrow back alleys that seem to lead nowhere in an effort to find this view of the Grand Canal with the sun setting over it. After the alley widened nearer to the canal, I found a small restaurant/bar lived at the end of this tiny side street and its patrons were happily watching the skys colours reflect in the canal while sipping on a drink and dangling their feet off the jetty. What seemed like a secret to me was, of course, not so hidden for the locals.

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Eilean Donan Castle Panorama

Photo of the Day

Happy 2012 everyone! Let’s start the new year off with a photo of one of my favourite places on earth: Eilean Donan Castle.

This is one of the first castles I ever visited and I’ve been hooked on the things ever since. I grew up reading Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and whatever other fantasy novels I could get my hands on, so if I couldn’t spend any time around knights or dragons, a castle would suit me just fine. Unfortunately for me, you don’t find a lot of epic castles in western Canada.

So when I took a trip to Scotland in the year 2000, I was awestruck. All my romantic, idealised visions of medieval Europe came to life. I had never walked a castle’s walls until Eilean Donnan, so it holds a pretty special place in my fantasy-loving heart. After all, you never forget your first castle, right? It was just as great when we got the chance to last year.

This particular shot of the castle deviates from the usual views you’ll spot on the postcards in that it’s shot from the East to the West. The castle itself doesn’t cut quite as interesting a profile from this side, but this blossoming sunset was too good to pass up especially after a mostly rainy day driving up from Northwest England on our way to the Isle of Skye.

This panorama was a challenging one to get exposed properly. The sun obviously overwhelmed the scene on the left side, so I bracketed exposures through the whole panorama. There was a fair amount of post-processing work that needed to be done to align the photos and get the different exposures working together, butI got there in the end to reveal this photo which captures some of the warm glow that bathed the castle that evening.

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Eilean Donan Castle


Photo of the Day – Cape Town Meditation

Last year, I was in Cape Town, South Africa for a couple weeks on a product shoot with work. It was a hectic schedule though – it left almost no time for seeing the city. That was a bit of a shame, of course since Cape Town is a captivating place with a lot to explore.

The top of the list of things to see is Table Mountain. Ok, you can’t help but see Table Mountain if you’re in Cape Town; what I mean is to see Cape Town from Table Mountain. It took until the last night of my two weeks there to get the chance to ride up the cable car with a camera in hand and gaze out at the magnificent views of the scenery below.

It’s a rather astounding place and I imagine the person in this photo has found nirvana. Perched on a rock high above the city, the sun gleaming in the sky and an endless ocean stretching into the distance – that’s contentment.

Click to see it larger on flickr:

Cape Town Meditation