This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I recently had all my print photos from old trips scanned, and then tackled the (rather large) task of editing them all. Most are not that great; they are, by their nature, the pictures I took when I was a less experienced photographer, with predictably mediocre results. But it’s a little fascinating to watch my skill develop as I learned, by trial and error, the basic rules of composition.

This is one of my better efforts, and an early example of my tendency to try and get symmetrical shots of large architectural features. 🙂 It is, of course, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This is the last of my shots from the Chinese lantern festival in Dallas, and gives a good sense of what the whole exhibit was like. I took this one very nearly at the end, when I was dead tired (and fighting a cold) — but it was worth the effort to get the reflection in the mottled surface of the lake.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This — which we found in the cloister of Westminster Abbey — is probably the most gorgeous ivy I have ever seen in my life.

That is all.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I have another version of this shot that frames that ocean rock partway in a gap between the branches, but I ended up choosing this one because it has much more of the spiky, zig-zag look to the branches. It’s as if someone transplanted part of Maleficent’s hedge from Sleeping Beauty to Point Lobos, California.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

After the more standard tour of the Wieliczka Salt Mine, my husband and I opted for an additional tour of the underground museum, which contains random historical artifacts and information on the geology of the area. These salt crystals were in a high case, hanging above everything else; I darkened the background to let them show in all their monochrome glory.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

We visited the enormous Churaumi Aquarium while we were in Okinawa. My efforts to photograph the whale sharks met with limited success, but I had better luck with the coral, which was beautifully vivid.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

We basically stayed at Malbork Castle until they kicked us out at closing time. Then we spent a while longer roaming about the grounds, finding shots like this one, with photogenic lens flare.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This is one of the surviving fragments of decoration in the Forum Baths at Pompeii. It gives you a remarkable sense of how beautiful the place must have been before the eruption — the sort of glimpse into the past that never. happens. on archaeological sites.

Not unless a volcano helps out, anyway.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Chinese-styled garden of Fukushu-en in Okinawa is really impressive to wander through, and my favorite part was this: a small pavilion perched atop a rocky hill, overlooking a waterfall that pours into the lake below. You can wander around inside the hill, too, through a little cave scraped out to let you see the waterfall from within.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I made an undignifed spectacle of myself the evening of my mother’s birthday dinner, borrowing my father’s camera and crawling around on the porch with my butt in the air to get this photo of a bird hanging out underneath the railing. Fortunately, both my parents do enough photography that they understood. 🙂

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

For my birthday, I give you: one of my two favorite spots in London. (The other is the front steps of St. Paul’s, right by my hostel; I ate many a dinner sitting there and watching the sun set down Ludgate Hill.) The garden you see here belongs to the Salters’ Company, but on the far side there’s a little fragment of park beneath this, one of the largest remaining fragments of the Roman and medieval London Wall. You can see its patchwork nature and the toll taken by the passing centuries, but it’s a nice little relic of the City’s past.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I have a Thing for ceilings.

You haven’t seen too many images of them in this series because a lot of them don’t come out very well, or when you get down to it the ceiling in question is simply not that interesting to anybody who doesn’t have a fixation. But this ceiling? HOLY MOTHER OF GOD. It is possibly the most awesome ceiling I have ever seen. It belongs to a small pavilion in Fukushu-en, a Chinese-styled garden in Okinawa, and it is just . . . phenomenal.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I believe this was the last photo I took on our recent trip to Hawaii, a split second before my camera’s battery died. Memory tells me there’s some local folklore about that tiny island (which lies off the coast of Oahu); it does not oblige me by recalling what the folklore was. I did like the framing of this shot, though.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Roman museum in Bath had a really cool way of presenting the fragments of this pediment: not only did they hang them up on the wall in their original configuration, but they had a light fading in and out to show you what the rest of it looked like. I stood there FOREVER to get a shot that was steady, timed right, and devoid of other people’s heads wandering through . . . .

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Blue Mosque — or more properly, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque — in Istanbul is a remarkable sight. I really wish I’d had more time to actually appreciate the sight of it; sadly, we were with a tour group that pretty much had to rush through everything (in part because of a woman who seemed to have overlooked the fact that the tour involved, y’know, walking, and complained and dragged her feet the whole way through).

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

There’s a very distinct style of decoration to be found in major Polish churches, and that style is HUGE. Also GOLD. The various chapel altars, etc. we saw there pretty much all looked like this: massive gilt structures that look like they’ll stand until the Second Coming. They certainly make for an impressive sight.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

At Ephesus, the remnants aren’t properly put into position until the archaeologists are sure they have them arranged correctly. I don’t know whether this is an actual reconstruction of a bit of building, or whether they just stacked up what they’ve got until they can deal with it properly — but either way, the tree with its flowers made a nice backdrop.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Near where I live, the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct (which supplies fresh water to the San Francisco Bay Area) terminates at the Pulgas Water Temple, a random little decorative site. The road leading to it is closed off on Sundays for people to bike or walk through the area, and my family went there for an afternoon; I thought I had lost the pictures from that jaunt, but recently recovered them.

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

If this had still been intact and in situ wherever it belongs at Malbork Castle, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second look. But chipped and skewered on iron rods in a side courtyard? It suddenly became much more photogenic. 🙂

This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

It’s rare for me to do heavy editing on my photos. I crop them a bit, straighten them out, enhance the colors until they look like I remember them being in real life.

But on this occasion, I feel obliged to share with you all the original form of the photo:

I loved the carving in the ground, but the light made it absolutely impossible to get an overhead shot (which would show the turtles properly) without my shadow ending up on it, too. But with some heavy cropping and manipulation of the colors, I was able to properly convey the awesomeness of what really looks like a pair of turtles with jet engines in their butts zooming around together in in the depths of space!