Shanghai, China. January 2016
Malaga, Spain. January 2016.
Jaffa, Israel. January 2016.
Evora, Portugal. February 2016
Olivença/Olivenza, February 2016
Badajoz, Spain. February 2016.
Bilbao, Basque Country. February 2016.
Sydney, Australia. March 2016.
Manila, Philippines. March 2016.
St Sampson, Guernsey. March 2016.
St Helier, Jersey. March 2016.
‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. April 2016.
Heidelberg, Germany. April 2016.
Madrid, Spain. May 2016.
Florence, Italy. May 2016.
Preikestolen, Norway. May 2016.
Duisburg, Germany. June 2016.
Tel Aviv, Israel. June 2016.
Herodium, Judea and Samaria. June 2016.
Ma’ale Rehav’am, Beyond Reasonable Classification. June 2016.
Hebron, Palestine. June 2016.
Jerusalem. June 2016.
Lyon, France. July 2016.
Turin, Italy. August 2016.
Helsinki, Finland. August 2016.
Tallinn, Estonia. August 2016.
Albertville, France. August 2016.
Geneva, Switzerland. August 2016.
Baffin Island. September 2016.
Vancouver, British Columbia. October 2016.
Estes Park, Colorado. October 2016.
Hollywood, California. October 2016.
Heraklion, Greece. October 2016.
Majorca, Spain. November 2016.
Vamdrup, Denmark. November 2016.
Marrakech, Morocco. November 2016.
Lisbon, Portugal. December 2016.
Tehran, Iran. December 2016.
Greece.
The Comet, Monrovia
Mindful that they an impressive coast,
Is Monrovia another tax/passage “flag of convince”
country for ship owners?
(Much like American, et al., Cruise Ship owners use)
Yes, Liberia (along with Panama) is one of the world’s main flag’s of convenience registries. Monrovia is the capital of Liberia. I would love to market a line of toilet paper with each sheet a different national flag and call the product line “flags of convenience” 😆
Holy crap, do you travel for a living??? Or are you just most restless and probably best organised person since Genghis Khan?
He is a bit like Genghis Khan Lemon Jellyfish, except rather than raping and pillaging, he takes pictures and drinks beer
Clearly a spy.
>drinks beer
For the Australian government, by the sounds of it.
As always, I neither confirm nor deny anything, other than the beer.
Michael — these are absolutely awesome photographs. For once (pace PBase!) “stunning” is le mot juste, as Bertie might say.
Words fail me. Thank you.
Julie
So have you been travelling again Michael?
Seriously – the photographs are very good (I am at one with Julie on that).
I think the one from Norway is the most impressive – very much a different world.
I will never see any of these places now – but I am glad that you can still visit them.
I always suspected that eventually London would run out of beer.
it seemed to me that all we had was all we had was a bunch of snapshots, nothing particularly exceptional about most of them. The cargo ship, laid up by the look of it, (since there was no cargo handling equipment in sight), is just about as commonplace as cargo ship pictures get. The swastika in Guernsey might well have a story attached to it mind you. Look, there is nothing wrong about those pictures, nor bad, but why the praise? Samizdata is truly excellent, it stands up proudly as a good blog. So why the fulsome praise, when none is needed?
Fantastic.
And thanks for Olivença. You know that is a not resolved issue between Portugal and Spain.
@Peter Melia
Because i think it is fantastic that someone here can travel like this and gives us some flavor from the world.
In the next two months I am flying to Switzerland, Singapore, New York and Malta. All, however, are business trips, with not much chance for sight-seeing, alas.
Why not? No shirt off anyone’s back, I hope?
That’s for the praisers to decide 🙂 In any case, it seems to me that praise is not the purpose of these posts, but rather the story behind each photo (if the readers can guess what that is) – but I could be wrong, of course.
I particularly like the picture of Obama in Geneva.
(Sorry. It’s a Clint Eastwood reference.)
Obama is John Calvin?
Clint Eastwood is John Calvin?
No, alas, I don’t get that one.
I sometimes (these days very sometimes, as my life is busier than it was) post photographs of things I have seen in the world and I do tell the story behind them and the context. The end of year travelogue is a holiday thing (holidays missed this year as I was on holiday in Iran), and what Alisa says is part of why I post them – sometimes there is a story behind them that I am being enigmatic about. (Alisa knows at least a couple of the stories, as she was there). Sometimes there is an interesting juxtaposition of things in the photographs or even a simple thing in the picture that says something unexpected about the place in question. Sometimes there are connections between different photographs in the travelogue. And sometimes I just think the picture is pretty. The travelogue does need one or two of those, I find. The photo of the ship in Heraklion was one I had second thoughts about, and I probably would have replaced it with something quirkier if I had not got to the “Just push the publish button” stage yesterday. However, it was the first picture someone made a comment about, so…)
And I put these photoessays together as a challenge to myself, and to simply show off a bit. Summarise my year with one photo for each visit I made to a foreign country in the year. I allow myself to stretch this rule a bit by having a flexible definition of a “country”, and in various other ways if I feel like it. This rule of course biases small countries and close countries over large ones and big ones. There are five pictures of Spain because I went to Spain on five different trips, but only one of the Philippines because I only went there once. I simply broke my own rule in posting pictures of both California and Colorado from the same trip though. I simply felt like it.
Obama as an Empty Throne (the Empty Chair), I would assume. bobby?
. . .
It’s not the subject matter that makes an image (including a painted picture, or a sculpture even) artistically bad or good or excellent. It’s how it’s handled. With photos it’s having an eye for the good angle, the right lighting, and the composition as a whole.
Shanghai, Madrid, and Tel Aviv don’t quite make it technically (hence aesthetically, to my eye) — problems with light — but so what. The rest include some that are what I might call “reportorial snapshots,” not great art perhaps but I’ve seen that quality of work even in National Geographic. Jaffa, Manila, Albertville, and the like. Also Hieronymus, which is reportorial but a few cuts above a “snapshot,” and amusing besides. Michael’s photo compliments the sculptor’s work very nicely, say I. Then there are snapshot snapshots, “wow, that’s kinda interesting,” like Teheran, or Jerusalem.
But several of them are technically excellent as well as highly evocative and moving — which are the qualities that make Ansel Adam’s best work so superior: What’s so special about a damn tree?! Bilbao is (to me) depressing in its look, but it’s very good precisely because it’s evocative and (artistically) moving, though in what I see as a rather unpleasant direction. Best of the best include Evora, Olivença, St. Helier, Heraklion, and the list goes on….
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Also, What Alisa Said.
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Also, Michael, you did an excellent job in terms of a travelogue. But you’re wrong about Heraklion! ;>)
One of my vices as a photographer is that I like to try to do arty things with light. So I take photos in which the sun is directly visible and there are lots of lens flares and interesting things happen with colours, and stuff like that. (One reason I like to do this is that the result can be so much better with a decent camera and a good lens when one tries this than with the cellphone cameras that most people use). But I sometimes overdo this. The Madrid photo is an example of this – one that I kind of like. True colour – no, but interesting effects. The Shanghai photo was one of a very limited number I gave myself to choose from – I was in China for 10 days or so, but only 1 of those days was in 2016, and by my arbitrary rules I had to use a photo from that one day in which I didn’t take many photos, and the weather was shocking. (You can see some condensation on the lens, if you look carefully). For Tel Aviv, I again only had a tiny number of photos to choose from, and all of them were taken after 10pm in the evening using entirely artificial light with no flash. There is some distortion due to the light conditions, but again I rather like the result. My basic feeling, though: I want to mix up different kinds of shots in this sort of posting.
If you’d asked me which photos I like the least out of the whole set, I would have actually said Evora, St Helier, and Heraklion. I don’t think they are technically the worst – they are all technically good photographs – but I find all three of them kind of boring.
Yes, exactly, Julie. I was afraid I was being too obscure, and I was right. Sorry, Michael.
Well, Michael, I know people who actually prefer, say, Bach to Rachmaninoff, if you can believe it! So, different strokes, I reckon.
I understand about the “arty” things with light, but personally I love fog and also crispness of image, so there’s that. Also, I love the ones that are expressive of what I love. They’re the ones that give me the biggest and best sense of “narrative,” though not in a verbal sense of course. There’s a lot more I could say, but never mind.
By the way, what bothers me about Tel Aviv is the dratted neon advertising lights at the top. I can hardly lay their existence at your photographic lens!
Thanks for your remarks on your aims in presenting the travelogue (I think it’s quite successful), and also on what delights the photographer. :>)
Lucklucky:
Michael wrote about Olivença back in February 2010.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any good travel photos. I do have a pic on my cell phone of my cat in the dog bed, however. 🙂
Oh yeah, Ted, you can make the claim and brag about it, but do you show it? 😉
We want to see the evidence! (As you surely know by now, all Samizdatistas are feliphiles, and the more well-bred among us are caniphiles as well.)