Sue W. sponsors the WP Weekly Photo Challenge prompt and this week the word is Up.
Up makes me think of stairs or other means of ascending. These are photos from our most recent trip to Egypt and Israel, Dec. 2018-Jan. 2019.
This stairway looks a little scary! At a mall in Tel Aviv, Israel
We went up this narrow street in Jerusalem, but had to move aside while a vehicle came down – on the stairs!
Take your pick: stairs on the left or right, or ramp in the middle (Old Jerusalem)
Stairway at the Church of Virgin Mary (Hanging Church), Cairo, Egypt
One of the women in my Egypt tour group confided to me (partly in jest!) that, “If I’d known there would be so many stairs, I wouldn’t have come!”
Of course, when you are touring a place you’ve never been, especially if you’re a photographer, you also do a lot of looking up.
We looked up at:
Ceilings (Hanging Church, Cairo, Egypt)
Tops of buildings (Cairo)
Tops of columns and ceiling carvings (Temple of Khnum, Esna, Egypt)
Church domes (Church of the Flagellation, Jerusalem, Israel)
Windows (Old Jerusalem)
Murals high on a church wall (Peter of Gallicantu Church, Jerusalem)
Climbing and looking up give you a view of the world that you would otherwise not observe!
From a cruise ship, Panama Canal
While cruising on an electric boat on the Chicago River
Our daughter gave it to me in anticipation of our upcoming trip to Tanzania at the beginning of February. She knows I always keep a journal when I travel (and use as the basis for my travel blog posts), but this one has a different focus entirely. I usually do my journal chronologically, but this journal encourages an entirely new set of parameters. There are pages for me to write, or draw, or tape something, on every conceivable topic. Here’s a sample page:
This brilliant rainbow appeared after a rainstorm and close to sunset on a May evening, on our way back to South Dakota after visiting Devils’ Tower. It’s my favorite because the rainbow was so nearby, that I could see it “touch” the ground.
I took this photo from inside Shakespeare Theatre on Navy Pier in Chicago last September. It was just past sunset. I love the different hues of blue with the silhouettes of skyscrapers in the background.
This is sort of an oddball photo, but it’s one of my favorites because of the subject matter. Leaving a lecture at a local community college in November, I passed a room with all these microphones sticking out of the wall. I’d never seen anything like that before and it just struck me, particularly the different bends in each of the cables, creating a sort of chaotic group of curvy black shapes. Then I played around with the light and special effects on the photo to create this result. The closest microphone has a sort of light aura around it, which I tried to enhance further, but couldn’t with my limited photo software. Anyway, I think it’s kind of cool and would like to take more photos of unusual subjects like this.
This is probably my favorite picture of flowers this year. I took it at the Chicago Botanic Garden in August. The purple and blue combination on the flowers is so vibrant.
Finally, I was excited to get so close to a pair of loons while on a pontoon boat ride on Lower Kaubashine Lake in Wisconsin with my family last July. I had seen them earlier in the week and knew they had a chick, which was fishing with them on that earlier day. On the pontoon ride, we somehow ended up coming between the loon parents and their baby! The pair approached the boat cautiously and we watched them so quietly, until they began to make distress calls (this is a sort of up and down trill and denotes a warning or danger). Everyone on the boat was trying to get Dale to speed up so we wouldn’t be blocking the pair from their offspring, who had begun to make a distress call back to its parents. Although it was exciting to see them up close and snap several pictures of them, we also wanted to leave them alone. Over the years we have been spending some summer weeks in northern Wisconsin, I’ve gotten to really love these beautiful water birds and the variety of vocalizations they make. Loons are very shy birds, even though they have, by necessity, become used to sharing their habitat with humans. This is a fairly recent phenomenon and so it is still special to be able to observe a loon family at such close range.
Wanderlust & Wonderment 