View allAll Photos Tagged quirky
It must be great attending classes age 6, sat next to students age 16. What were those crazy Amish teachers thinking when they devised their education system? Surely they were capable of building school houses, you know, more than one house? Or couldn't they have embraced the modern day concept of - "house" - that building thing with a lounge, dining room, bedrooms (plural), den, kitchen - roomS with an "s" ie more than one working space under a single roof.
And what is it with the horseless carriage? Maybe the teacher has a plan.
"And today children, we are going to do some PE. Who is the first volunteer to pull me into town?"
More observations on a daily basis from The Pisstakers
I enjoyed my visit to this show yesterday, and as ever I was struck by the variety of work on display.
This quilt was the one I wished I had done and I loved the quirky way that this creature was stitched.
It was touching to see a whole stand devoted to the work of Marie Roper who died a short time ago. Marie was the person who inspired me to stitch to a higher level and she was an inspiring tutor and a kind and loving person.
I miss her lots.
Bazaar is my favorite new store in Baltimore! My husband recently found out about it and said it was a place we had to explore. I'm so happy we did, because it fed my quirky soul. If you're in the area and like oddities and curiosities, be sure to hit it up!
Bazaar
3534 Chestnut Ave
Baltimore MD
iPhone 5
January 2015
My husband got a new toy & the boys wanted to sleep in the empty box. Those are Luke's feet, Ben is curled up inside the box.
Yes, that is a hole in the glass of the shower stall. Yes, it was a bit quirky. Yes, good use was made of it.
Two of my most quirky pieces of photographic gear. The yellow brick - mirrorless K-01. And a 1950 Carl Zeiss Jena Biotar 58/2, T, with 17 blades and pre-set mechanism. Both fun to use!
Processed mostly in Flickr's Aviary.
Handmade at our workshop in Denmark. Crafted from quality materials, carefully created with passion.
Model Sammie Marie at Louie G's in Fife, Washington
Print version: society6.com/VoronaPhotography/Quirky-pose_Print
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I had five “main” stops planned for Guangxi this week. The first two – Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces and Yangshuo – were fine…all I’d hoped for, even if the weather wasn’t the most ideal for photography. Can’t control the weather. My five days in northeast Guangxi having been spent, today would be a travel day to the opposite side of the province…to a very remote (and, by most people’s consideration) somewhat hard-to-access area.
I was headed for the western border of Guangxi province: Detian Waterfall. It’s called Ban Gioc Falls in Vietnamese. It’s on the border with Vietnam and I believe they say it’s the second-largest transnational fall in the world. (I actually think that’s a mistake, though; I know for certain that Iguazu in Brazil/Argentina/Paraguay is the largest…and Niagara certainly feels bigger than this.) However, second- or third-largest…I don’t care about that kind of designation. Since waterfalls are one of my favorite things to shoot, I was looking forward to getting here, even though I knew I would be giving up a LOT of time to spend less than two hours here.
Since today is all about riding around on buses, I’ll just comment on the scenery and general impressions of Guangxi’s landscape.
The bus out of Yangshuo left around 11:30 in the morning and was supposed to pull into Nanning (provincial capital, smack dab in the middle of the province geographically) 6 hours later. That made me feel a bit less optimistic about being able to make it out to Detian in one day. Some things aren’t in our control, though.
The ride across the northeast was pleasant enough. The karst landscape of Yangshuo gradually faded away after an hour or two, falling farther and farther into the distance. The only major city (that I remember) between Yangshuo and Nanning was Liuzhou. It’s a city I’d never heard of before, and I’ll just say it seemed larger than I expected and looked like it might have been nice. It was in a nice area, anyway, if you like an almost-tropical environment.
I was very glad to see that we were pulling into Nanning well under our six hours that everyone in Yangshuo told me. It was right around 4:15 when we pulled in to the Nanning bus station and the first thing I did was went straight to the ticket window to see about how to get to Detian.
According to Lonely Planet, there is one direct bus a day at 8:30 in the morning, or you have the option of taking a bus to Daxin (about 70 km, I think, south-southeast of Detian) at various times throughout the day and then transferring to Detian…somehow. The ticket lady confirmed that that was indeed the case, so I bought a ticket for the first available bus to Daxin…which happened to be leaving at 4:30.
Now, I’ll take a pause to write all the good things that I experienced the this time and the two subsequent times I passed through town this week: (wait for it…wait for it…) Ok. I’m done.
So, with my ten minutes in Nanning, I ran to KFC (not ideal, but at least I know how to order it, can identify it, and know that I’d get it in time to catch the bus), ate, and then ran to the bus. Goodbye, Nanning!
The road to Daxin was highway for the first hour, and pretty uneventful. Green, for certain. Trees abound as it’s almost-tropical. After we turned off the highway heading slightly northwest towards Baise, we took a two-lane road directly west towards Daxin. A few minutes off the highway, the landscape changed. Common woodlands gave way to banana farms.
These farms were massive. I had no idea China had a banana industry like this here, and I was impressed. It would’ve been a lot of fun to do some landscape photography here, but I had to settle for hoping for a few not-so-terrible pictures from a bus whipping by at 80-100 kph. Not ideal, but you do what you can.
About halfway down this road to Daxin, we had to switch from our double decker coach to a smaller bus. It seemed the road was closed or something, and the coach wouldn’t fit down the road where the detour was.
Past the detour, the banana farms thinned out, and the hills started encroaching. I enjoyed a pretty pastoral, pleasant sunset (not amazing, but…nice), and we finally reached Daxin well after dark. Though it was almost the longest day of the year, it was close to dark-as-night by 9:00 p.m. (You can thank China’s lack of having time zones for this.)
Daxin doesn’t happen to be a terribly big (or pleasant) town, so I was slightly concerned when the bus pulled in to the parking lot and there were no taxis or anything else around. I didn’t even see any hotels, though I’m certain they have some…and the bus station just happened to be away from the populated area.
There was one lonely car with one lonely man in the parking lot, and I rushed up to him before anyone else got to him – though nobody else seemed to be looking for public transportation – and asked if he would be willing to take me to Detian in his minivan. For 200 yuan (steep by Chinese standards, but reasonable by mine), he agreed to take me to Detian where, according to LP, there were plenty of cheap hotels right next to the waterfall.
We left Daxin around 8:30, and wound our way through the dark night (and reasonably unlit road) that wound its way from Daxin north to Detian, eventually paralleling the Vietnam border – though I couldn’t see it at night.
Finally, I’m guessing about 60 km later, and around 10:00, my road trip was done. Close to 10 hours, three buses, one minivan, and one taxi helped me get my way completely across Guangxi to the Vietnam border.
Slightly exhausted, but not too frazzled, I walked into one of the hotels listed in LP, asked for a room, and was set up with a perfectly clean and comfortable (if fairly Spartan) room on the third floor of another Whatever-Name Hotel with friendly staff of limited English skills. (This is completely typical in China.)
After getting settled in, I went out to find something to eat at one of the only two restaurants open at that hour and settled for a fairly mediocre plate of fanqie jidan for about 15 RMB. (That’s a Chinese dish…scrambled eggs and fried tomatoes, usually made with a pinch of sugar, and served over rice.)
After finishing most of my eggs, I paid, thanked the folks at the restaurant, and then went back to my room, falling into a deep sleep before starting the day at 7:00 the following morning.
Friday morning was one of the few days I had hoped for it to be cloudy. Any of us who like to shoot waterfalls understands how much harder it is to shoot them on a bright, sunny day. I was thrilled to wake up and see a completely overcast sky, and also that it was just a little misty/rainy. Nothing more than a drizzle.
I walked down to the waterfall ticket office, hoping that they were open before 8:00. To my delight, they were, and I paid my 80 RMB (at least I recall it being 80) and headed on up the way to the gate about 400 meters away.
This was fantastic. At that hour, I had free reign of the place, and hardly a soul to be found, except those working there (or vendors). I love the excitement and expectation of waterfalls…hearing them before you see them…and then trying to do them justice and have fun capturing them with different shutter speeds, polarizers, etc.
Before saying a word about the falls, I’ll apologize in advance for over-posting and posting so many similar shots of the falls. You’ll have to understand that, living in China for five years, I’ve been going through severe waterfall withdrawal (especially since I lived in Oregon from 2007-2009 where I was beyond spoiled by the excess of falls in that state).
Here at Detian, it was a typical cascade that was split in two (think Niagara Falls, but less distinctively so separate). The approach was down a small stairway a few hundred meters below the fall, then walking the river bank on the approach. There are a lot of bamboo rafts here, too, that later in the day turn the base of the falls into a virtual parking lot. At this hour, though, they were all tied up. I paid 5 RMB to go out for a less obstructed view of the falls from the base, about 100 meters away.
After that, I just tried to find a few different/interesting places to set up and shoot for nice angles and perspectives before heading away from the base and climbing the stars to the top level of the falls. After shooting the bas and mid-falls level, I climbed away from the falls and walked the upper road parallel to the river that headed back towards the karst landscape. I was in search of the 53rd Mere Stone.
This stone is the quirky oddity of this particular waterfall. On the Chinese side, there are stalls and more stalls selling souvenirs, local food, and so on. They eventually thin out, and you come to a little fork in the road that leads you to the 53rd Mere Stone. It’s the stone that marks the legal, recognized border between China and Vietnam and it’s the only point where you can legally cross into Vietnam without needing to get a visa. (There are no border guards, gates, or any other such thing.) The Vietnamese side was much like the Chinese side…but a bit dirtier, and poorer. Just a cluster of stalls, motorbikes, mud paths, and souvenirs, cigarettes, and all touristy things Vietnamese. (I had to ask to make sure I was in Vietnam, and they confirmed I was. So, “Ni hao” quickly became, “Xin chao!” With that, my Vietnamese was exhausted, but I was pleased. Hardly anyone spoke to me there, though, as they seemed shocked to see a large, white elephant man in their midst.) I was fascinated all the same.
After spending all of five or ten minutes in Vietnam (I still don’t know that I should count it as a country I’ve visited; I feel like I’m cheating if I do), I made my way back over to China, back past the falls on the upper road for a few last shots, and then out to the parking lot to figure out how to get to my next destination – Beihai – as soon as possible.
I sure was doing a lot of cross-province travel these two days, and today would be much more cumbersome than I imagined possible…
Quirky, off the wall design, featuring 'Blood Apple' logo in a 3D apple for DJ Stevlor and his 'Blood Apple' music promotion business.
pulling this forward for DitATuesday........... went way back in my archives and found a couple that were largely unnoticed and uncommented on ~grin~...... it was back in the day before i posted to other groups.
#ds 67 quirky things often catch your eye and make for interesting art. make a photo of something that makes you go "hmmmm" today.