CFFC: Boats Through the Ages

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week is Anything to do with boats. All the photos in this photo essay are from my travels near and far. 26th Century BCE – 1st century BCE: Ancient Egypt Modern Egypt: Today the Nile teems with cruise ships alongside fellucas (open air sailing boats with no cabins), fishing vessels […]

Perspectives Great & Small

Sometimes a photograph cannot convey the bigness or smallness of something unless it is given perspective by including another object whose dimensions we are familiar with. For example, I can post photos of the immense pillars of Karnak in Egypt, built 3,500 years ago, but you can really get an idea of how massive they […]

Thursday Doors: Cairo’s Islamic Art Museum

I am finding photos in my archives that I have never blogged about before, some suitable for Norm’s Thursday Doors challenge. We were on our own our last day in Cairo, because we were going to Israel to join up with a tour group there. On recommendation, we decided to go to the Museum of […]

Sculpture Saturday: Field Museum

Mind Over Memory has a weekly invitation for sculpture photos. Last year, when we got home from our trip to the Middle East, we visited the Egyptian exhibit at The Field Museum in Chicago. These are sculptures – or sculpted wooden mummy cases. Royalty in ancient Egypt would encase their mummified loved ones in several […]

Tops of Egyptian Columns

The tops of columns, called capitals, in ancient Egypt are spectacular in their variety and beauty. Sometimes, a column top could have the head of a god/goddess, such as this column depicting Hathor, at Hatshepsut’s palace, which contained a temple dedicated to this goddess. She was an important goddess, especially for women, being the goddess […]

2020 Photo Challenge #6: Patterns

2020 Photo Challenge is about working on techniques to improve one’s photography. This month’s theme is patterns. Here are some of the host’s suggestions: February: Being Creative with Patterns look for various types of patterns – squares, circles, triangles and so on. Shoot from a different perspective. Look up, look down or shoot from a […]

January Square and One Word Sunday: Cacti & Petroglyphs in Saguaro National Park

We visited Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona late in the afternoon, where I got some great backlit shots of saguaro, such as this one: I am fascinated with saguaros, which are the trees of life in the Sonoran Desert, because of the interesting shapes that sprout as “arms” from their main trunk. Saguaros grow […]

A Photo a Week: Brown

I once wrote an essay about brown (part of my series about colors). It maligns the color, however – actually things I personally associated with it – so I am not going to include it here. In fact, like in Nancy Merrill’s challenge A Photo a Week, I also associate brown with Thanksgiving. My first […]

October Squares: Artistic Lines

Becky’s Month of Squares challenge is back! Hurray! This month the theme is Lines & Squares. In the past month I have visited two museums: the Chicago Art Institute and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. Plenty of opportunities for lines!! Squares too, probably. Here are the rules for Month of Squares: Create your line […]

Journey to Egypt, Part 22: Temples of Abu Simbel

January 2, 2019 We disembarked our vessel, Aida, this morning and boarded a bus for a 2-hour + ride to the town of Abu Simbel, for which the temple was named. The landscape along this route is mostly desert. The town of Abu Simbel is a good place to be introduced to Nubian culture. The […]