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One of the most splendidly relaxing things we did during our India trip was visit the “backwaters” of Kerala — a series of waterways plied by houseboats, like the one you see in this photo. There’s a bedroom in the “house” with a kitchen at the back, and dinner was partly made from fish and shrimp pulled out of the water less than an hour before they went in the pan. I love being on the water, and while I prefer the sea, there’s a lot to be said for a quiet bit of floating around.

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The old/tourist part of Kraków has a lot of these things: little bronze models of the famous attractions, with plaques telling you something about the site. They’re really handy, especially when (as is the case with this model) they show you what the place looked like back in the day. The moat around the Barbican is gone now, except in this pint-sized version.

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Some of you may recognize this fellow from In Ashes Lie. It’s the Uffington White Horse, a stylized figure carved into the chalk hillside. The only really good way to get a photo of it is from a helicopter or plane, but I did my best . . . .

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By the time I went on my honeymoon, I was starting to get better at photographic composition. This one especially pleased me, with the dolphins in the foreground, the crumbling walls in the background, and the intense blue of the harbor at Rhodes to contrast with the sculpture and the sky.

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This fellow stands on a monument to the Battle of Grunwald, just north of the Stare Miasto in Kraków. He’s actually celebrating the victory of Polish and Lithuanian forces over the Teutonic Knights . . . but the dude looks like he’s belting out an opera aria on the topic.

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This is another one I dropped a filter on, in this case because doing so made the sculptural details more distinct. It’s one of the tympana over the entrances to Notre Dame, and reminds me oddly of the temples we visited India, which is the only other place I’ve ever seen that density and intricacy of carving over a large surface. (Though if this had been an Indian temple instead of a French cathedral, the whole building would have been carved like that.)

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My mother came to town for a visit recently. Before her arrival, I sent an e-mail to her and my brother (and my husband and my sister-in-law) suggesting that perhaps we might visit Filoli . . . and sheepishly admitting I might have a photographic motive for being interested. Much to my amusement, my mother responded that she had been thinking the exact same thing! (My father: not the only photographer/pusher in the family.) Unlike my sole previous visit, this time I was there early enough in spring to catch the tulips before their glory days had ended.

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This is a wall mural of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of The Last Supper. It sits in St. Kinga’s Chapel in the Wieliczka Salt Mine . . . which means that, like pretty much everything there, it’s carved out of rock salt. Which, you have to admit, is pretty impressive!

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Most of our time at Kiyomizudera was spent wandering around outside, but there were portions of the visit where we passed through some of the buildings. I quite liked the lamps along this gallery — even if I have no idea where in the temple we were when I took the photo.

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The Église Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre in Paris is decorated in a very unusual style — elements of Art Nouveau, and (as you can see) a mosaic surface that almost looks like beads. While I’m a big fan of Gothic architecture and other standard church designs, it’s also nice to encounter one that breaks the mold in attractive ways.

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Happy Tax Day to my U.S. readers. 😛

Photographing museum exhibits is hard. The light is often low, or else glares off the glass; the glass itself is generally smudged, scratched, or both. I’ve started getting better at it, though, and this shot is possibly my finest museum photograph ever. I’ve mentioned before that I clean up my photos in Lightroom, right? Well, this one is almost completely untouched. I cropped a bit of the left edge and upped the clarity by a tick, and that’s it. Sometimes the picture just comes out right on the first try.

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This is another lucky shot: the squirrel happened to stay still long enough for me to catch him in this great pose. Every time I look at him, I hear Eddie Izzard in my head, going on about the difference between “Executive Transvestite” and “Action Transvestite.” This, my friends, is distinctly an Action Squirrel. 🙂

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Getting a good shot of Trevi Fountain is exceedingly difficult. You wouldn’t know it to look at this shot, but the place was mobbed with approximately eighty billion people that day. To get this photo, I had to worm my way to the direct center of the place and up to the very edge of the fountain itself, then lean back as far as I could to take the widest shot possible. It paid off, though — and I must say that Trevi is one of those sights I found to be exactly as splendid as I had hoped.

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The structure you see in the background there is the entrance tower to the twelfth-century Chennakesava Temple complex in Belur. It is huge; this is a shot up at it through the well in the courtyard (a framing I was rather proud of). The density of carving you see there is about par for the course in the temples we visited, which had me reflecting a lot on how clumsy a great deal of twelfth-century European art is by comparison.

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I have another photo of irises that is arguably better (one taken earlier that day in the San Francisco Botanical Garden — this is from the Japanese Tea Garden just across the road), but I happen to particularly like the way the sun comes down through the petals of the top flower in this one.

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Amusingly enough, both my husband and I took this photo — identical in almost every detail. 🙂 What can I say? As with so many things in Highgate, the moss and the fallen leaves really made it.

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Malbork Castle has taken quite a beating over the centuries, particularly during WWII. The restoration has not yet made it through the church, and while I would be delighted to see what it looks like when it’s back in one piece, the ruined version has a great deal of charm. This bird (which might or might not be an eagle) is hanging out in the sanctuary with various other fragments, awaiting the restorers.

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The ceilings in the Vatican are phenomenal. My pictures of the ceilings in the Vatican, sadly, are mostly not so phenomenal, because I didn’t have a tripod — but this one came out pretty well. And while on the one hand the inequality of wealth that produces things like this is not desirable, I am glad to have the results of it.

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The thing that I’m proudest of with this shot is, it was taken at rather high zoom with my camera braced on the railing of a walkway that vibrated every time somebody took a step. This butterfly was in the “rainforest” chamber of the California Academy of Sciences, and I’m delighted that not only did I catch it sitting still (which can be damned hard with butterflies), but it came out this crisp, too.

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I have another shot of these same gargoyles from a slightly different angle that has some really interesting sunlight going on, but I decided to post this one because it’s one of the few times so far that I’ve made use of the “vignette” option in Lightroom. That’s what created the darkening around the edges, which is another way of making a photo look old. I particularly like the way it echoes the shape of the corner here.