These photos are from past challenges (mostly photos I DIDN’T use), squares and others, for Becky’s October Squares and Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge – straight lines.
PastSquares & CFFC: Lines
buildings
Life in Colour: Blues
Jude’s Travel Words blog’s topic for Life in Colour this month is the color blue. Jude challenges us to find “unusual” blues! OK, I’ll do my best…
L-APC: Large to Small
Lens-Artists host this week, Patti, has given us an interesting challenge: Pick a color and choose photos with objects of that color from large (like a wall or a building) to small (like a mushroom or an earring). I picked two colors: White and Pink.
WHITE
Largest: a snowy landscape
Large: a round white barn…
…and its door
Medium: Our niece’s wedding dress (with blue embroidered flowers!)
Smallish: Styrofoam chest with ribs and intestines
Small: Flower – hydrangea blossoms
PINK
Large: Pink building façade
A little less large: Pink ice cream truck, “The Original Rainbow Cone”
Medium, whole: Andy Warhol cat
Medium, in pieces: Bridal Shower Jeopardy
Medium, Pretty: frilly dresses & Medium, Patterned: 60s dresses
Medium, delicious: Birthday cake
Smallish: Umbrella
Small: Orchid
CFFC: White, Off-White, & Cream
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge‘s colors this week are white and cream colored.
CFFC: Apartment Living
Cee has a new theme for her Fun Foto Challenge, which is all about buildings. This week the topic is modern houses and apartments. I decided to concentrate on apartment buildings, which tend to be more modern than houses (at least around here).
CFFC: Painting of Many Kinds, Times & Places
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week is anything painted.
Sunday Stills: Getting It Straight
Terri Webster Schrandt has a Sunday photo challenge, Sunday Stills. The theme this week is straight.
Apartment building (Woodstock, IL)
Here’s a place I’ve really been missing the last few months – the library! (Des Plaines, IL)
Under these floor tiles, several hundred people were buried during the Middle Ages! (Oude Kerk, Amsterdam)
Bridges: Pegasus Bridge (Normandy, France)
Bridge over a river on the border of Germany and Austria (near Scharding, Austria)
A tall house (Mont St-Michel, France)
Entrance to a graveyard (Merville-Franceville-Plage, France)
A straight and narrow street in Passau, Germany
Ornate fence in front of the World Museum in Vienna, Austria
CFFC: Roofs of Europe
The roofs in Europe are varied and interesting. So for Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week with the topic of roofs, here are some European roofs.
Mont St.-Michel, France
Abbey cloister and courtyard
Roofs with gulls
Roof with window
Amsterdam, Holland – These are my favorites due to their variety in architectural style.
2 views of the roofs of the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam’s largest art museum), including solar panels! The building was designed by Pierre Cuypers (who also designed other buildings in Amsterdam in the same style, including Centraal Station and Concertgebouw) and opened in 1885.
The rest of these Amsterdam roofs were photographed during a private boat tour, which included all the major canals and the harbor, so there were many types to see, both on shore and in the water!
Behind the boats in the foreground is the roof of the NEMO Science Museum, which is shaped like a ship!
Modern apartment buildings
This red roof really stands out!
Houseboat roofs:
OK, it’s a tour boat, not a house boat, but it has an interesting mascot – Brunhilde the elephant?
This houseboat rooftop has a nice deck (with furniture) for sunbathing on hot days!
Colorful flowers grace the roof of this houseboat.
I’m not sure if this is actually a house, but it’s unusual!
Gabled roofs
Nuremburg, Germany
Nuremburg Castle has existed since medieval times. Made of sandstone, it was a fortified group of buildings built on a ridge in the old center of town. The city expanded outward from there.
Views from the ramparts of the town below
Schärding, Austria
In the countryside outside the town is this house whose energy is supplied by the sun!
Melk Abbey, Austria
Views of the town of Melk from the abbey
To end on a contrast, here are two views of dwellings in a Maasai village in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. The Maasai build their villages in a circle, surrounded by fences. They use the surrounding land for grazing and herding their animals, mostly cattle and goats.
Lens-Artists #84: Narrow Passageways
Amy at Lens-Artists this week invites us to explore the topic of narrow.
In my travels to “old” places – places built when there were no cars or crowds of tourists -I explored (or declined to explore) many narrow streets and other passageways.
Places like Old Town Tallinn, Estonia (where I got lost due to sidewalks and streets so narrow that I lost sight of our guide!)…
A van that is nearly as wide as this street in Old Town forces all pedestrians to the narrow sidewalk on the left.
There were also narrow witches!
In Stockholm, Sweden, I tried to imagine returning home to one of these narrow alleys on a dark afternoon in winter!
Dale ends our bike ride through Stockholm coasting down a narrow cobblestone street.
Stockholm, like many European countries, also has tall, narrow buildings.
Even older is Old Jerusalem, Israel…Like elsewhere, vehicles have the right of way, squeezing pedestrians to the wall.
Some of these climbing narrow streets are divided between steps and ramps.
Watch out for motorcycles coming through!
In ancient Egypt, clearly people were smaller to fit into narrow passageways into pyramids and tombs.
Dale and a few other adventurous souls (such as this woman from our group emerging from a pyramid) did go down these narrow steps into a now empty room in the Queen’s tomb in Giza. I took one look and decided to wait outside!
Tourists descend a long narrow hallway covered with inscriptions and paintings to reach the tomb of Ramses IX in Valley of the Kings. These hieroglyphics declaim the deeds of the king during his reign, and there are also symbols of gods to accompany him to the afterlife.
At the Chateau of Caen, France, a narrow stairway leads down to…where??
On Omaha Beach, in Normandy, are the remains of WWII German bunkers, which I declined to enter, also reached through narrow passages and stairways. (I’m glad I didn’t go in – my son’s photos show empty rooms with an inch of rainwater covering the floors!)
On the way back to our Airbnb farmhouse through the Normandy countryside, we drove down the narrow roads of villages, flanked by houses on both sides.
A car in front of us navigates a sharp corner into another narrow street.
A lot of traffic in Amsterdam travels its canals, which narrow on approach to bridges.
Floating traffic jam!
Bridges have these traffic signals indicating when it is safe and permissible to proceed (or not!).
The day after our tour of the canals, we went to the “red light district” where we were told not to take photos of the sex workers who lived on either side of these narrow alleyways. Probably also not a good idea to photograph potential clients – good thing this one came out blurry!
In Amsterdam, we stayed in an Airbnb 2nd floor flat, with a narrow stairway winding up to it. That was one of our son’s obligations to us for paying for his trip – carry our suitcases up and down! The stairway was so narrow and windy that he had to carry the suitcases one by one in his arms!
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Leading Lines
Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #80 is about leading lines. Leading lines are one of the “rules” of composition: There are indeed “rules” of photographic composition, which like many other rules, are made to be broken. Whatever their skill level or experience though, understanding and knowing when to use the “rules” of composition can be helpful for any photographer. This week, our challenge will explore a key compositional element, Leading Lines. …Leading lines carry our eye through a photograph. They help to tell a story, to place emphasis, and to draw a connection between objects. They create a visual journey from one part of an image to another and can be helpful for creating depth as well.
This is how I spent the last two Junes, 2018 and 2019.
Our road trip (mostly) on Route 66: Sedona and Winslow, AZ
We visited the Painted Desert, too: first, horizontal lines.
Undulating formations which slope downward.
In Santa Fe, colorful pillars…
and a souvenir shop with paintings lined up along a counter.
When on Route 66, here’s a sight not to miss: Cadillac Ranch. It had rained the night before.
A year later, we were on a river cruise in Europe. One of the first ports of call was Cologne, Germany with its famed cathedral, with stained glass windows reaching toward heaven…
…and soaring arches decorated with sculptures of saints.
Later we crossed the bridge to return to our ship. The inner side of the bridge is covered with “love locks” – padlocks people leave in honor of their sweethearts. They stretch on as far as the eye can see!
Next stop was Marksburg Castle, which afforded beautiful views of the Rhein River and town below (I wish I could photoshop that pole out, but I don’t have the software).
And here’s a different view: a steeple rises up as seen through a turret.
Marksburg is definitely a “must” on any Rhine River cruise. It’s like a fairy tale castle!
Farther on down the river, a swan swam over near our ship.
We were passing through a lowland area.
I loved the small town of Miltenberg, which was so picturesque!
Inside a church, hymnals were stacked neatly in the narthex. One is drawn to the word Gotteslob, which perhaps means hymnal.
Our final stop on the cruise was Budapest, Hungary. A memorable part of the day we were there was a walking tour through the old Jewish Quarter.
Wanderlust & Wonderment 