For this week’s Monochrome Madness, This week’s host Brian of Bushboy’s World has asked us to consider Street lights. I assembled a clutch of them, and realised that they all come from Spain.
The featured photo was taken one evening near our hotel in Seville. This next batch all come from Cádiz.
… and one of them is merely a shadow of a streetlight.
Off to Málaga now, just after Christmas.
Another one from Seville …
And the city I know best, Barcelona? Well, not a single night time shot. Instead, here are two taken in broad daylight.
Near the Arc de TriomfNear the Cosmo Caixa Museum.
I’m away for a few days, so this post, and the next few are scheduled. So – sorry – I may be slow in commenting, and even slower at reading your posts.
This week, Anne-Christine invites us to share Magical Moments from for the Lens-Artist Challenge. I’m choosing a magical few days spent four years ago in Cádiz, Andalucía.
Cádiz isn’t a city with world-beating museums or inspirational churches. But it’s the oldest city in Western Europe, founded by the Phoenicians. Greeks and Romans peopled the area, and from the 8th century, the city was a Muslim stronghold for 700 years. Christopher Columbus sailed from here three times on his voyages of discovery to the New World, and in 1812 the first Spanish Constitution, making a unified nation of the peninsula’s disparate kingdoms. All this is reflected in today’s city.
For us though, this was a seaside city of characterful streets. It had once-upon-a time fishing quarters now re-purposed for locals and tourists alike as the place to relax at an outdoor table over a leisurely meal (this was January).
It was the city where we could find delightful old bars selling local sherries to savour and compare. And above all, it was the city of sunsets. Every evening it seemed, everybody came to the seashore to simply stand and watch, and witness the magic of the sun dipping down over the sea and beyond the horizon. These photos have not been edited or retouched – except to correct the odd wonky horizon.
Even one of its museums, the Puppet Museum, Museo del Titere, had moments of magic. How about these rather witchy women?
Or the magical and gigantic baobab tree?
Two months later, as we looked back on this special holiday, it seemed even more magical. We hadn’t known as we wandered its streets that this would be our last bit of freedom to travel for a very long time. In March 2020, the world locked down.
Amy has invited us to thumb through our archives for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge #250 and choose skyscapes and clouds. I’ve found it impossible to be dispassionate about this. There’s something about these images that’s so bound up with memories that I can’t distinguish good photos from the merely ordinary. I’m transported to that place, that time, that set of souvenirs.
Take my header photo, for instance, which I’ve posted before, more than once. It takes me immediately to that special day when I was part of an evening boat trip quietly floating through the lagoons of l’Albufera near Valencia, while birds made their final flights as the sun settled below the horizon. It’s a memory which will never leave me, whether the photo is a winner or not.
Longish sea trips to the continent bring memories of languidly looking at cloudscapes from early morning till nightfall as our ship smoothly purrs towards its destination. Here’s one …
… or this…
Or there are those memories of January days in Cádiz. An unmissable part of our routine was to head to the beach at dusk to watch the sun slowly disappear into the sea.
This shot, from our time in the Balkans shows that a slightly neutral skyscape can be a perfect backdrop for a questing bird of prey. And this was a holiday of birdsong, wild flowers – and memories of a still wild landscape.
A quick visit to France, to the Minervois for a moody sky. This was a trip just a few weeks ago, when on the same day as this shot was taken, we saw tiny daffodils sheltering from the brisk wind.
I can’t leave this post without a local shot, taken as we walked a habitual path alongside our River Ure.
That is the question posed by Patti, for this week’s Lens Artists’ Challenge #228. Well, not done for me exactly, but done for my photos. Have a photos diagonal lines invited us in, encouraged us to explore the picture, or to focus on some detail?
Let’s have a look, and have a bit of a trip out too.
We’ll start off close to home, one cold wintry morning as I went to get the paper. Those rays of sunshine enlivened the scene, and my mood.
Here are two more, from just down the road. A tree which instead of reaching skywards, leans across the woods to demand a place centre-stage for the whole shot. And ox-eye daisies splicing the image in half, showing us there’s countryside, not a garden beyond.
A trip to the seaside? Alnmouth in Northumbria?
This quiet beach looks dramatic when the tide’s out.
Brussels now. A bank of plate glass windows reflects the opposite side of the road to dramatic effect. Monochrome too, for Bren’s Mid-Week Monochrome.
Off to Spain now. All those dizzy hairpin bends in Cantabria invite us to explore.
Then two more scenes – one from Cádiz, the other from Valencia. Those diagonals pull us in to explore the cathedral in one, the reflections in the other.
This shot, from Alicante, uses the ropes on a yacht as a frame for the scene beyond.
Alicante
I’ve hesitated over whether to include this last shot in what is essentially a light-hearted post. But this photo – not a particularly original one as so many others have taken similar shots – has stayed with me. It’s Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. These are the railway lines that brought so many thousands of Jews on their very last journey. I wrote about it here.
I decided on balance to include it, as the relative optimism I felt when I wrote that post five years ago has disappeared in the light of world events over the last couple of years: and we shouldn’t forget.
At the moment, we all need the glow, the zing that a good splash of yellow can provide. Luckily, Jude has provided the perfect opportunity for us to hunt down all our yellow-rich images, in her challenge Life in Colour. Let’s have an injection of gutsy, vibrant lemon, amber and gold alongside our long awaited Covid vaccines.
I’d thought of showing those springtime flowers we all love – aconites, daffodils, primrose, tulips and kingcups. But maybe I’ll save those for another day. Here’s a complete hotch-potch of yellows to cheer up a day which, here at least is thoroughly and dismally grey.
The sign that greets me whenever I leave the house
A shop and its reflections in Granada
My first friend in Bangalore: the rickshaw driver who took me on a tour of the city
William, obligingly wearing yellow, at Newby Hall.
Advance guard at Le Tour de Yorkshire
A puppet at the Museo del Titere, Cádiz
A pinted door in Valencia.
A back street in Seville.
Garage door in Seville.
Another Seville door
Valencia
A Seville building in need of a make-over gets one …
To view any image full size. just click on it. The quotation of the post title is by Vincent Van Gogh. No wonder he liked sunflowers. And the header photo shows one word from another quotation. Wander round the St. Paul’s area of London and you’ll eventually uncover the whole sentence, from Virginia Woolf’s novel, Jacob’s Room: ‘What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?‘ What indeed? In this area of London, enough to fill an entire guide book.
To cheer you up on a cold and snowy Saturday (rain later), here are puppets, all from the 1970s and 80s, from one of Cádiz’s best-kept secrets: El Museo del Titere – The Puppet Museum.
I have said it before, and I expect I shall say it again, but our few days in Cádiz earlier this year – this year! – are part of another life – a life I want to remember and treasure. And Jude provides an opportunity in her Travel Challenge. She’s hoping that outline, rather than three dimensional qualities will come to the fore in our choices of photo. As I looked through my archive, I realised that Cádiz fits the bill, yet again.
It’s nearly all about the seafront. Those palm trees! Those street lights!
Or we could look beyond the old city to industry and modern life in the distance.
Or we could go indoors – first to climb the Cathedral tower and to inspect the old clock workings: before going to a traditional sherry bar, Manzanilla, to enjoy a quiet drink and a snack surrounded by those barrels of maturing sherry ¡Salud!
Tomorrow, for our regular Tuesday Day Out, we’re taking (another) trip to Cádiz. We’re going to spend time near the sea and pop to a couple of places in town. But today I want to take you instead to Plaza de España. Here is a handsome house in a handsome area. But now it’s down on its uppers. No longer smart, it’s still extremely characterful. I thought it deserved its fifteen minutes of fame.
Was it really in January this year that we were in Cádiz? It feels like another era, but one I can summon up in my head by remembering the glory of the sunsets we saw there. You’ll have seen at least some of these photos before, but this is your Virtual Holiday for the week. I’m presenting them to Jude for her Photo Challenge this week, and to Becky – well, one of them anyway – for her October Squares. How kind of me to share!
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
You must be logged in to post a comment.