Weekly Travel Theme – Motion

(Racing by a show-stopping Santa Barbara sunset on the Amtrak Coast Starlight)

The back-to-back, Monday-Tuesday, one-two photo challenge punch continues with this week’s Travel Theme of “Motion” from Where’s My Backpack. It is a counter-intuitive concept, to capture motion in a snapshot – I thought Ailsa picked the perfect quote to reflect this:

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” – William Faulkner

And, with that, here are a few glimpses of motion I have captured both here and abroad.

(Dolphins playing alongside our whale watching trip in San Diego)

(Young rhesus macaques playing with prayer flags – and visitors – at Swayambhunath – The Monkey Temple – in Kathmandu, Nepal)

(Watching the last wave of the evening, and resting after a long day in the sun and sea – Playa Dominica, Costa Rica)

(The Peloton entering Place de Concorde in the final stage of the Tour de France – Paris, France)

(The slow meander of The Nile on a clear night – Cairo, Egypt)

(And, of course, no “Motion” post would be complete in my world without featuring my niece and nephew (both newly) in motion – thrilled with their mobility and clearly on a mission to tackle my camera.)

Weekly Travel Theme – Dance

Besides dancing it out in my own living room after an exceptionally good day, there is not much dance in my everyday life. So, when Ailsa challenged her readers with this week’s travel theme of “Dance”, I was genuinely stuck for a moment. My first reaction was to lament that I’d not reviewed the theme over the weekend, so I could have gone out and found dancers (taking new photos based on these weekly themes, rather than digging through the archives is the next step in this process of bettering my photography). My second impulse was to wish my nieces and nephews were just a bit older, because there is nothing more fun than crazy toddler dancing. Then I started digging – turns out the archives are not as dry as once thought… Let’s Dance:

My time in Nepal was full of dancing – from this father-daughter dance at the reception of the wedding I was attending (isn’t the bride’s sari amazing?!), to these children dancing in the streets to the sounds of another wedding party walking to the bride’s home in the traditional ceremony of Janti.

Weddings are great venues to catch dancing, in general. These are photos of the first dance from two friends’ weddings I attended recently – the first in Dade City, Florida; the other in Washington, D.C (look at her shoes! I’m still in awe).

There is nothing more French than doing the Can-Can under the Eiffel Tower on Bastille Day – right? 

And no one, given the chance, would turn down the opportunity to dance with Dropkick Murphys on stage at L’Olympia in Paris…

Lastly, there’s this guy. Dancing solo while a clarinet busker tries to make the most of his day in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. He doesn’t appear to care about anyone else (especially the stranger with a camera) – he just needs to dance. 

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above

This week’s Photo Challenge from The Daily Post is “From Above”.  The moderators suggest taking photos looking straight down to as a way to change  perspective for common sights, objects or situations.  Rather than look at something familiar from a different angle, in considering my entry I recalled an occasion in which I had to get above in order to actually see the view in its entirety. In May 2011 (almost exactly 2 years ago), I had the great fortune to travel to Kathmandu for a friend’s wedding. The week that I spent there is truly beyond description, but on one of the few mornings without a scheduled event, our small group of American friends took the opportunity to get above the city and into the mountains.Our evental goal was Mount Everest, but along the way we would be taken past 14 of the highest peaks of the Nepalese Himilayas. Here are just a few of the photos I took that day, glued against my tiny, fogged up porthole in the 19-seat Buddha Air flight.One of the most stunning vistas were those seen when the clouds parted just enough to see the mountains rise all the way from the surface. Usually a river or lush valley ran between green, rugged peaks that rose, continuously, through the sparse clouds and emerged in the blue sky, jagged and snow-capped. One by one, we were all invited to unbuckle our seat belts and join the pilots in the cockpit of our small plane. The view afforded through their windshield was stunning, clear and almost panoramic in scope. My timing was impeccable. As I stepped in between the two pilots, craning my neck forward, Everest came into clear view (that’s it there, the tallest peak on the left). At first, I was somewhat surprised – it didn’t seem so impressive, surrounded by its mountainous brothers and sisters. We flew closer, could see vague outlines at base camp and then it struck me, how far above the Earth and how far away from my everyday reality we were. I felt so small, but my mind and perceptions were open incredibly wide. The whole world was laid out below me, the view was heart-achingly beautiful and none of this could have ever been seen any other way than flying above.