A landscape, almost. The weather in Moscow today was glorious, totally unseasonal, and here the setting sun catches these blocks that tower around the fringes of central Moscow like the monoliths in Monument Valley, some from the Communist era but many rather newer than that.
Well, sometimes I have been known to work for my crust. My colleagues appear by now to be competing to make an appearance on this blog, Georgia complained audibly today that she’d never been on it — whereas Boris has, once before (in November 2011, a picture I still like). So there you go G — you made it…
Sometimes the shot just waves at you and cannot be ignored. What this scaffolding was for, heaven knows, but it was being built this evening, on a grand scale, in front of GUM, the huge shopping mall which lines one side of Red Square (it stands for Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin, or ‘Main Universal Store’).
Third consecutive Sunday spent up in the air on my way somewhere — in this case, like two Sundays ago, Moscow. This shot was taken on the final approach in to Domodedovo airport. Probably I break a few composition rules here but hey, that’s what rules are for, right?
Second, and last, day of a two-day gap between coming back from one trip and heading off on another. It must be significant that both the photos in the gap have been of the ground of my home town.
Back home, just for two days. This was a photowhack — the one and only picture taken today.
Not my take-off, obviously — but we were next in line to head into this rather worrying sky. Mind you, I shouldn’t have been anywhere near being able to take this shot. I had to sit through a five-hour flight delay today on my way home from an enjoyable few days in Dubrovnik. But these things happen for a reason.
I call most cat shots ‘cheap’ because they are just such photogenic creatures, you don’t really have to make a lot of effort to get a decent shot of them. They are beautiful and willing, like all good models. Today in Dubrovnik the weather was far, far worse than it has been in the last few days, cold and stormy, but this little cutie, pictured in the grounds of my hotel, meant I didn’t have to worry over much about the lack of decent light and also the fact that, y’know, I kind of had to work for most of the day.
If it’s the conference dinner, wheel out the folk dancers…. I sometimes wonder whether we should do this kind of thing with conferences in Manchester. You could take the delegates into a local nightclub, pour them blue WKDs and let them photograph the natives as they get down to it on a Friday night.
For around five hundred years, from the early 1300s until 1806, at which point it had to surrender to Napoleon, Dubrovnik was one of the major powers of the Mediterranean. When you see the impressive fortifications, you can quite understand this. And damn, it’s a beautiful city too — but surely beauty and power go hand in hand in so many ways.
Being 42 