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Inside the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba
This heritage site is amazing the blending between Islam and Catholic art and architecture is so well blended that makes us forget everything outside and feel a true peace of mind. Makes one think what is going wrong with the world? For sure GOD as an entity of good, just want every one to coexists in peace and do good, no matter what any religion says.
Please, I don't intend to offend in any way any one's belief, or start any kind of ideological discussion, this is just my point of view.
This is were the famous adventures of Don Quixote started, the attack on the windmills that he believes to be ferocious giants.
One curiosity is that each windmill has it’s one name, and the same happens with it’s windows.
And to celebrate Portugal victory nothing better than the iconic Tower of Belém on the bank of the Tagus River in Lisbon, Portugal.
View of the Adraga beach and Horse beach during sunset.
Praia da Adraga
Praia d Cavalo
Sintra, Portugal
La Torre is a castle near Buonconvento and dates back to the thirteenth century and once belonged to powerful families of Siena.
The castle was completely restored in the second half of the 800, taking on its current appearance: it is made up of two buildings that overlook a large courtyard surrounded on two sides by walls surrounded by a moat.
Now they are doing new restorations who knows, maybe it will turn into a luxury resort.
Alhambra is really an amazing place where one can appreciate ant once the beauty of at least three different civilisations and Era's. It's just like an cultural overload...
Taken at the Castle of the Moors in Sintra.
This is the large water cistern that provided water to the entire castle built in the 8th century.
Santa Maria della Salute or Saint Mary of Health as an amazing story that can be easily associate with it the famous masks of the doctors of the black plague.
The Torcal of Antequera Natural Park in Spain, is an amazing place totally sculptured by the water and wind during thousand of years, forming all this corridors and strange forms that sometimes it can become a real labyrinth.
Maybe this image I saw on New Years Day 2020 was a foretelling of the year to come. On a blustery cold morning, in an inhospitable environment, isolated from all other forms of life and exposed to the elements of freezing temperatures, snow and howling winds, this lone juniper not only survives, it thrives.
With no eyes to appreciate its view of the West Temple, nor grow fearful over its precarious perch 1000' over the tunnel entry below, this lone tree grows tenaciously reaching toward the heavens, even though that exposes it to the dangers even more.
Isn't that what life is really all about?
Recognition:
Semi-finalist - North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) Showcase 2023
Bronze Award - 2020 EPSON International Pano Awards (Open Landscapes)
The Hungarian Parliament Building, also known as the Parliament of Budapest for being located in that city, is the seat of the National Assembly of Hungary, one of Europe's oldest legislative buildings, a notable landmark of Hungary and a popular tourist destination of Budapest. It lies in Lajos Kossuth Square, on the bank of the Danube. It is currently the largest building in Hungary and still the tallest building in Budapest.
We planned to visit Yosemite over the Christmas holiday school break, and despite the federal government shutdown continued the trip. I'm glad we did.
At 26°F, it was a chilly morning and each stop for pictures was a challenge. I am very glad we stopped here.
Recognition:
Selected - 2019 RENNEN Photography Prize Top 25 Winter Photography Festival #rennentop25
Select Fine Art prints of this and other images can be purchased at bit.ly/ProPeak
The lower latitude of the setting sun in winter brilliantly isolates the Mountain of the Sun in this image from the bank of the Virgin River.
At it's peak, Mountain of the Sun reaches 6722', which is about 2500' above this view point. The cool waters of the Virgin River flow through Zion Canyon, continuing to carve this gorge deeper and bringing ever more rocks into the stream.
Although the Lower Emerald Pools Trail is currently closed, the bridge across the Virgin River from the National Park Lodge remains open and allows one to reach this spectacular vantage.
Recognition:
Merit Image - MAR 2020 Professional Photographers of San Diego County (PPSDC) - Nature/Landscape Category
The high desert of Southern Utah can be unforgiving. Here, along the Hickman Natural Bridge Trail in late Spring, there are few signs of life.
Pectols Pyramid across the Fremont River Canyon is a sandstone formation which dominates the landscape to the south of the Hickman Bridge Trail, but it is the knife-like sharp limbs of the dried out, dead, gnarled juniper in the foreground that rightly dominates this frame.
This land is open to the elements, exposed to extreme temperatures throughout the year, and a place where only the heartiest plants and animals survive. This juniper once fell into that category, but after decades if not centuries of life, it too succumbed to this harsh environment.
Recognition:
Merit Image - MAR 2020 Professional Photographers of San Diego County, Nature/Landscape category
Although small, Holgate Glacier is active.
On a recent catamaran tour of Kenai Fjords National Park from Seward, I was able to capture several images of this glacier calving small icebergs (known as growlers and bergy bits) into Ailik Bay.
Holgate Glacier is both a mountain and a tidewater glacier, meaning it fills a valley between two mountains, and it terminates in the sea, as shown here.
Incomprehensibly massive sheets of ice, the flow and calving generate an incredible amount of sound, nut unlike artillery fire, followed by large splashes. To get a sense of scale of the glacier shown in this image look to the lower right third of the image for three birds that are flying away from the calving portion.
Better yet, take an opportunity to go visit Kenai Fjords National Park. There are several options to experience this environment originating from Seward, Alaska.
For some that phrase would describe their eyes after a late night of partying and ringing in the New Year. For me on this first morning of the 20s, it meant first-light reaching Towers of the Virgin in Zion National Park.
Being a native East-Coaster, who has transplanted to life on the West Coast, I still feel that the New Year occurs when the crystal ball drops in New York, and that's the end. So, with the aide of staid Springdale, Utah, it was easy to get an early bedtime on New Years Eve so we could begin the trek to the Canyon Overlook Trail at 6:00 AM to catch first-light and sunrise from this vantage.
The trail is a relatively flat mile hike with a few tricky spots where the ice and slickrock conspire to give even the most sure-footed concern in the dark. Once we reached the overlook, I was a little concerned that our cold trek may have been for naught, due to the heavy cloud cover. Though they were thick overhead, there still was some clearing to the East, along the sun on the horizon to light a narrow band, reflecting off the cloud bottoms and warming the sheer rocks faces of the Temple of the Virgin ahead. This image was captured about 10-15 minutes before the local sunrise time, and is considerably brighter than what we saw with our eyes, due to the 20-second exposure.
Once the actual sun rays reached the Temple directly, the light only lit the areas seen here in red for less than 5 minutes before disappearing above the clouds for the remainder of the day.
Recognition:
Merit, Nature/Landscape category - JAN 24 PPSDC Image Competition, San Diego
Selected for Display, Color Scenic Landscape: Winter - JUN-JUL 2023, International Exhibition of Photography, San Diego County Fair, Del Mar Racetrack and Fairgrounds, CA
The trunk of a fallen tree lodged in the rocks at the top of Abrams Falls adds a bit of character to this forest glen.
The pool below the falls is a tranquil place along a hiking trail. The falls are loud, but consistently so, creating a sort of white noise that adds to the serenity. This tree, suspended as it is, adds a bit of tension to the scene. When will it fall? How long has it been here? Will a bear, raccoon, or some other animal end up making it an impromptu diving board?
ift.tt/1uGTkJi: The sunlight shines from the other side of the gate in the wall surrounding the medieval old town of Tallinn, Estonia. - ift.tt/2aLv8QN //
It is said, that the castle have built in just a month during a transit by Archduke Maximilian of Austria. However, this legend could be refuted by historians insofar as the construction took significantly longer than a month.
ift.tt/1uGTkJi: Sunlight shines through the old gate on the medieaval wall surrounding the old town of Tallinn, Estonia. - ift.tt/1YMzCpS //
Winter heightens the drama at Death Valley National Park.
Certainly, this is known as the hottest place on earth, and contains the second lowest point in the western hemisphere, but most people are unaware that this is the largest national park in the lower 48 of the continental United States. The park also contains large portions of the Argus, Panamint and Amarcosa mountain ranges, with Telescope Peak reaching 11,049' in elevation.
The view from Zabriskie Point (named for a Vice-President of the Borax company, which mined here with their famous 20 mule-teams in the early twentieth century), captures the sandstone badlands of the Amarcosa in the foreground (including the Manly Beacon and Red Cathedral), Death Valley, and the Panamint Range as the backdrop.
On a chilly winter morning following an exceedingly rare rainfall, the skies are dramatic with the sun reaching through some of the cloud layers, but not others, to create drama and colors, not normally captured here.
On location in Anza Borrego State Park to capture Milky Way images above the formation known as the Pumpkin Patch, the temperature was searing at 98°F around sunset, with very little air movement at ground level.
As I waited for nightfall, the few clouds in the sky put on quite a show with the assistance of the sun in its final throes of the day. To the west, these lower stratus clouds took on a brilliant red hue, contrasting nicely with the pale blue sky and white altostratus at higher elevation.
But, what really worked for me was the appearance of the two closest clouds, which had a somewhat ominous look of Chinese style dragons in flight, the lower one having just pulsed its wings and stretched out for full speed, while the upper rears its head in a beckoning cry.
Recognition:
Accepted for Display - JAN 2023 Darkroomers Photographic Club at the Photographic Arts Building in Balboa Park, San Diego.
There are few places in the United States where one can view feral horses in their natural habitat. The beautiful (and protected) horses that freely roam Assateague Island National Seashore, along the Atlantic Ocean, are tough enough to survive scorching heat, mosquitoes, stormy weather, and the remote windswept barrier island's poor quality food.
Le port de Nice sur la Côte d'Azur
Le Port de Nice, le plus beau chemin vers la Corse et la Sardaigne !
Sunlight breaks through the redwood canopy to shed some light on young trees and the forest undergrowth. On a cool December morning, the first day of winter, the rays are seemingly carried by mist, creating an ethereal scene.
This is the Jedediah Smith old-growth grove of Redwood National and State Parks in northern California.
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About 30 minutes after first light, an iconic American sunrise is completed just in time for the local fishermen to head out to work.
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Velvet reflections on ice as Seurasaari, Helsinki, Finland. Sun was setting and sky suddenly opened. Reflections from ice was beautiful and vibrand.
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Standing in the midst of Teddy-bear Chollas staring into the sunrise is an amazing experience. The cold desert is aglow with warm sunlight, and the cacti appear to be aflame.
Fortunately, although this was taken at the same time wildfires ravaged the northern and central California coastlines, there were no actual fires near Joshua Tree NP.
Our hearts and prayers remain with all of our neighbors to the north who have suffered tremendous losses, during these difficult last couple of weeks.
Select Fine Art prints of this and other images can be purchased at bit.ly/ProPeak