mountains are wonderful, but the sea is even more.
portuguese (still) life
i'd be delighted, if i received a post card from portugal's coast with the photograph above. first of all i personally like narrowed sections way more than vast overviews, which is why i almost never miss a wide-angel option for my daily photography. and in the second place i think, that the shown scene is very typical for the rural region between porto and lisbon: resilience, colourfullness, bluntness, beauty.
btw: if my arguments hadn't been just this tiny little bit stronger than tina's, we'd have returned home with three instead of two cases, the additional one filled with various portuguese tiles from the flea market...
lighthouse guard
my relationship to the lighthouse in praia da barra is a special one: basically i don't find it very nice, but it finally showed me the way into vacations again. after being surfing there two years ago, it has already been the second time i visited it; constituting the end of the landmass, marking the beginning of a wonderful, vast sand beach. good to know, that someone is looking out for this important landmark.
broken heart
although aveiro, one of our favourite smaller towns in portugal and the place, where the broken heart above was discovered, isn't exclusively famous for its tourism (but rather its university), even there on the spot the circumstance of travelling in low season has the big advantage of being part of a real, authentic city life; a fact, we prize highly. consequently our hearts were actually not endangered of being broken by solitude.
snake charmer
intersected torre
the torre dos clérigos, a huge bell tower right beside the identically named baroque church, is one of the most characteristic symbols of porto; and it is the place, where we started our journey in portugal once again. we already knew this historic building and its exposed position above the city and the river douro, since we had been accomodated close by in the wonderful poets hostel during our first stay in portugal's second largest city yet.
what was new for us, on the other hand, was the ultra-modern mall diagonally opposite porto's landmark: things can't be so bad in porto/ugal, if a government is able to erect a plaza like that, not forgetting to mention the also completely renewed park surrounding the area. well, we liked it.
dissecting force
hey folks, back from my vacations. first of all i'm going to arrive completely and have a deeper look on my shots. as usual i'll post a couple of samples and short stories you might be interested in during the next days and give you the possibility to participate in my time in portugal in this way.
on the side i'll have to set up my new working station: yes, i was productive in my holidays and finally ordered an ultrabook. so looking forward to the new machine. i'll report as well.
regarding the image above: i have the impression, that a lot of elections took place in the last weeks. besides the people in germany and austria with the parliamentary elections the residents of porto were called upon to elect, too. not everybody seemed to be able to understand, what kind of force the candidate mentioned here...
sooc. high contrast b&w mode.
21 hours deviation
although i used the fisheye mainly for sometimes funny, sometimes rather impressive self portraits of our hiking group in relation to the surrounding mountains, the walimex lens handles serious use cases very well, too. it's razor sharp, already at large apertures. and if you compose the image according to the fisheye characteristics, the results may gain from its speciality.
however, tomorrow noon, when i'll board a plane to porto, the sel35 f1.8 will be mounted on my nex7 again. i decided to leave (all the other lenses as well as) my good old laptop at home and do not publish photographs directly from my vacations, but in the aftermath. cu!
“away until beginning of october”
they have arrived
during the hiking trip i only had the sony sel 50 f1.8 and the walimex 8 f2.8 with me, (very cool) samples with the second one will be published tomorrow. using mostly the sel 35 f1.8 for my daily shooting, i had almost forgotten, how great the bigger brother actually is.
the sun had just come round the corner and threw warm rays of light through the early morning fog onto the autumnal slope. quite different conditions to my last photograph here.
