El Cotillo and sunset fishing

Today, me and Yuri went to El Cotillo in the evening to catch a sunset. Corralejo looks to the east, and I am not an early riser normally, so there is a very little chance of catching either in the two “sun just above the horizon” moments. El Cotillo is perfect for sunsets.

The bus driver who took us there looked at the tripod and repeated several times that the last bus back is at eight, at eight, get it? Am I got? I found it rather sweet that he was so anxious for us not to miss the last bus. Somewhat intrusive perhaps, but that’s all cultural, your business is everybody’s business it seems.

El Cotillo

We came to El Cotillo on Saturday evening to listen to some music on the second day of the free music festival Fuerteventura en Música 2012.
To be perfectly honest, for me it was mostly a pretext to have an evening on the west side of the island and to photograph some evening scenes. Kirill, who was there on the first night, brought back some pictures of some polygonal patterns visible on the stony part of the shore in low tide, less spectacular than ones at Giant's Causeway, but present.
There is indeed a pattern, more obvious in some places, less in others, and where the surface is more eroded, lines of lighter-colored stones are visible between the polygons.

evening light change

 Those two pictures were taken this evening with just eight minutes in between them. Just another demonstration of how fast everything changes when the sun is setting. Of course, the processing might have increased the effect, but the last bits of sunshine disappearing from the Isla de Lobos and the clouds is the most obvious difference

Morro Jable

Since we moved to Fuerteventura half a year ago, we spent every single night at the same place, not going anywhere, even for short while. It can be explained by the house moving experience killing all possible urges to move anywhere for a goodish while or by something else. Doesn't matter really. This weekend we finally took advantage of yet another religious celebration that shut both schools for two extra days and went to the other end of the island, to a small village Morro Jable.

It takes less than three hours by bus to cross the whole island. Big road ends in Morro Jable. There are smaller roads afterwards, one of them leading to the beautiful Cofete beach, but I don't like the look of those roads. I learned to drive in East Anglia, I like my roads straight and flat, and roads past Morro Jable don't satisfy either of those requirements

yesterday's sunset

in Norway. Not sure what the name of this beach is, but, as so many other things in Norway, the place is connected to vikings. There are big piles of (big) boulders, and they are remains of burial mounds, unless I don't get the explanation right.

And you not only are not supposed to remove "beach material" (which could be tricky, considering the size of some of those boulders) but not even allowed to build cairns. Probably the idea is that somebody might confuse your creation with a real thing and rush their finding to a nearest archeological society. Or something

Greeting to the Sun

I had big difficulties chosing those two pictures out of dozens taken on "Greeting to the sun" solar panel disk on Zadar's seaside. Zadar has two Nikola Bašić's installations, another one being "Sea organ", which is not very impressive visually, although not less imaginative. This one is visual treat, especially in summer sunset when it reflects the summer skies (and of course at night when it lights up in psychedelic patterns)

I added both pics as entries to Photographer of the Year competition - see them and links to other entries here and here

Lanzarote sand

This photo I made on the very first evening of the last visit to Lanzarote. First time I went through the raw files from that trip I didn't touch it because it was too dark. I still think it's too dark and color is quite obviously not great (contre-jour pictures rarely have beautiful colors), but somehow, with shining sand and that couple in the background, it asked to be shown, and here it is.

sunset at world's end

Verdens Ende

I just read that it has panoramic views of the Skagerrak - a geographical name that I though was fictional up to last year, when we went to Denmark. Now it follows me around, or so it feels.

here

hazy sea

inevitable long exposure shot. eight seconds exposure, aperture - also eight. at this time the artificial light starts to show close to the water edge, giving it reddish tink

Lanzarote sunset again

we are back from Lanzarote, arrived today in small hours.

looks like we got off really easy with airspace closure, although not inexpensive - extra holiday week did cost something, of course. but we didn't stand in long airport queues (apart from one instance), and didn't spend any time sleeping on the floor anywhere, and didn't have to cross half Europe on coach, train or foot.

our short and not very interesting story was that on the day the airspace closed - 15 April - we were supposed to fly back to the uk. I switched on the tv to check if my watch was correctly set and saw the news. Only Kirill went to the airport then, and, luckily, by the time he got to the desk, all the weird flying options ("you fly to Madrid, then take a donkey to Barcelona and fly from there...") for the nearest days were exhausted, so he had to take tickets for exactly week later - a bunch of them just became available, as people who were due to fly to Lanzarote on that day for a week cancelled the whole thing.

So we stayed for another week and flew back on the second day it became possible - which may well be the best scenario

Unexpected bonus was that when I was taking car out of Luton airport,I was fully prepared to pay a fortune for an extra week. Incredibly, they apparently waived the charges - when ticket was inserted, the barrier was raised and off I went. But maybe there was some glitch and they'll be in touch with coupla thousand bill, who knows.

when lights are switched on

the lighthouse on Murano is painted white, with two wide black stripes that don't quite meet on the island side. You can I am not sure if there is any meaning to it, but it looks like somebody realized that there's not enough black paint and painted the sea side only - for the tower to look its best when you approach the island. How it looks when you are on the island was deemed less important.

the lights were being switched on everywhere on the lagoon when we were coming back to Venice from Burano,

last glow

photographing sunsets is something that everybody does, and it's extremely difficult to produce something even close original in this area. so I didn't even try.

But - I just developed an instant theory why the sunset-y photographs are almost frowned upon by photographers - well, you know, they are generally landscapes, and landscapes are supposed* to have "an interest in the foreground", right? and what sort of foreground can you have in a picture where the main subject is sunset? - well, you can have a silhouette (human, dog, horse, bird, building, boat, standing still, moving whatever), but if foreground subjects are too big or you drag them out of pure outline with a flash, sunset is not a main subject any more. So it's somewhat difficult. Still, it's even more difficult to refrain from snapping away.

Anyway. Matter of fact, there was foreground interest in the original frame, but I choose to cut it off. It's (surprise, surprise) a photographer squatting on the water edge



* - I dunno why, one on these rules.

Lanzarote sunset

I don't expect that any of the stocks will take this type of sunset image, reason for rejection being "over-filtered". It's true that it didn't come like that out of the camera. However, I strongly suspect that the almost untouched version, if accepted and sold, will eventually appear in about this state, i.e. overprocessing will be done by the designers. Well, never mind

sunset dip

the sunset on our very last day on Lanzarote was not as spectacular as the others - there were practically no clouds. but we happened to be in the right place to catch the palm trees against the glow. the bathing couple was a definite bonus. It looked very romantic, although I must say, it probably wasn't all the warm at this time of the evening. on the other hand, maybe those guys were scandinavians, used to jumping into ice-cold lakes.

Lanzarote seemed to be quite popular with northern eauropeans. and I can't blame them, when we came back to just-above-freezing-point UK, I couldn't help thinking "we should have stayed there". It must feel a lot worse coming to below-freezing temperatures.