A small gallery of pictures I took in Dunwich Heath, in Suffolk coast, a while ago. As usually happens, the weather wasn’t very nice. I yet have to visit one of this coast places with good weather. Maybe in Summer? One thing that caught me by surprise was the Sizewell nuclear power station. I had no idea it was there. There is something about nuclear plants that doesn’t make me feel good. I know, they are efficient, cleaner in the long-term than other means of energy production, etc. But nuclear waste is still an issue and when one of this things goes nuts, the damage is immense, in size and time. Just take a look at recent examples like Chernobyl and Fukushima. I joked with a colleague at work about my fear of swimming in that place, not because of the cold, but the power station proximity. The guy told me he did fish there! His point was that the water around the plant is of the most pure quality you can find.
Today is my birthday. I remember that in last year’s post I joked about having a red sports car as a gift. This year this is what I want. I took this picture in Portugal last summer. It’s possibly one of the best beaches in the Algarve region.
Big gallery of pictures from Cabo de Gata, Almeria. I struggled a bit processing this ones. I first thought about doing black and white processing for these, in a similar way to my Low tide pictures. But I like the brown and ochre colours in these landscapes, so here are the colour versions.
The weather was really hot. At some point my car told me something about 37ºC. I spent a couple of days in this place. The plan was just visit some villages and spend some time in beaches. I started in the lighthouse of Cabo de Gata. From there I went to the Monsul Beach. That place is amazing. It is just a desert and the rock formations in the beach remind me, in its shape, like frozen rocky waves. In contrast, the water was totally calm and flat, and completely transparent. I’ve never seen water like that in a beach. There were lots of fishes also, and people trying to catch them. At the end of the day I went up to Las Negras and there I stayed in a hotel. I really liked that little village. The pebbles beach was a bit difficult to walk on, but it is a very unspoilt area, something I really appreciate. I hope it stays that way for long time.
The next day I went to Aguas Amargas. That place didn’t inspired too much to take pictures, so there is none in this gallery. But I had some great seafood. Something I miss living in the UK. That will be the theme of another culture shock post, I think… 😉
As a curiosity, Monsul beach was a location in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade movie:
A new gallery of pictures. These are also from my last holidays. I went places that mean a lot to me. Places mostly related to my childhood. Except Almeria, that I had never visited before. Close up views of the soil and floors I was standing on. A more down to earth approach, literally. These are some of the ones I most like.
I’m back from my holidays. I’m also really busy these days, but I have time to share some pictures I did in the past two or three weeks with my new mobile. The image quality is not the same as the ones I take with my DSLR, but I reckon it is quite fun to use a mobile for photography. At the end, It doesn’t change too much if you just focus on the composition and light. Also there are some really good image processing apps available. The one I most like right now is VSCOCam. The filters are subtler than the instagram ones. And the basic tools for cropping, rotating, colour temperature, contrast, etc… are there for you to use. Speaking of instagram, there is something I don’t like at all and that is the forced square crop. You can use some apps to add black or white extended borders, so you don loose the original framing, but that is an extra step that I find really bothering. One thing I would like to see is RAW support on mobiles. The JPGs get quickly degraded after a few edits.
In this small gallery you can see pictures taken in Cambridge, UK and some places I’ve visited in Spain during my holidays. I will post soon some more, along others taken with my normal camera, that I hope you find interesting. First I need to recover from some kind of post-vacation depression that is affecting me much more than needed… 😉
I did a quick trip this last weekend. I visited the Algarve, the south part of Portugal, an area I really love. These pictures are from some of the beaches I went to. The plan was drive to a place, lay on the sand, read a book, try to swim a bit in the chilly water and eat some great food in some local place And repeat. In order, you can see Marinha’s beach, Arrifana’s beach, and two pictures from Vila Nova de Milfontes, a place more up the north, in the Alentejo region. All great beaches except the last picture. Those sharp stone cliffs aren’t very swimming friendly. They are in Cabo Sardao. I really like the texture of those bent and melted sediments. Geology at its best.
The weather was great and I spent most of the time these beaches or travelling to places. I even a visited a very special place (for me at least) where I lived more than 20 years ago. I managed to meet some friend of that time. Initially I was a bit concerned; what do you talk about with someone you don’t see since such a long time? But things these days are a bit easier with this social media stuff. Maybe some of my imaginary friends are not so imaginary after all… We spent a whole day catching up about things. Fixing the world, as we say in Spain. Or should I better say our inner worlds…
Another five pictures, these ones from Felixstowe, the closest beach to Cambridge. I had already posted some other pictures from this place. In summer becomes a crowded popular place. I’d rather go to a more deserted place… Suggestions, anyone?
+ high-res version
Sorry for the lack of updates in the past week, I’ve been quite busy visiting Peak District, a national park in UK. I arrived home just yesterday with a bunch of pictures I need to edit and process. I will post the best ones here soon. In the meantime here is a couple more black and white pictures from Wells next the Sea. I hope you don’t get tired of this place. That broken dune really grabbed my attention.
A few more pictures from Wells next the Sea. I liked black and white for these. It might be that I’ve looked at lots of black and white photography lately and wanted to try something. The dune in the second picture is one of the two chunks left from the one shown in my earlier post. I was standing on top of the other one. The harbour area in this place totally empties with the low tide, as the first and last picture shows. The stranded boats made look this place like an old dead sea, if it wasn’t because the large bird crowds living here (and tourists taking pictures, like me).
I totally look forward to come back to this place in summer.
Low tides in this beach are amazing. The sea recedes hundreds of meters. Last December weather in this area was awful. Storms and tidal surges destroyed the coast line and a quite a few resorts were affected. Someone from that place that I meet walking on the beach told me that those two lonely sand dunes are the remainings of a bigger one that was broken by the violent sea. I told him that I couldn’t remember about that specific dune. This was my second visit to the place. The first one was a few years ago, and I think the sea level was different.
And that sea was not just after those dunes, but a lot farther…
Three pictures from Cadiz. First and third one is in Caños de Meca, where cape Trafalgar lighthouse is. If you follow the path and reach the lighthouse, you will see this view. The second shows some houses in Vejer de la Frontera. I don’t remember exactly where is this one taken from, but this little town needs to be walked. And better in the afternoon, so the white walls reflect the bluish light from the sky.
