Threesomes (August Break 2014)

The prompt for the fifth day is - not five, but three. Well, I first didn't quite know what to do with that and I was toying with the idea of skipping this one. But when I looked casually through my pictures from Europe I found quite some threesomes. Here we go!

Rainy Edinburgh - but the red still stands out

Three sunchairs in St. James's Park in London on a brilliant summer day - it doesn't happen too often, so everybody was hanging out in the park. These sunchairs are not for free though; you can rent them hourly. St. James's Park is my favorite park in busy London.

Three lovely sheep in the beautiful English countryside. Sheep belong to Britain like tea and fish and chips.

Three Union Jacks along the Mall in London. They were already preparing for Trooping the Colour, also known as "The Queen's Birthday Parade", which took place on June 14th this year.

Three scooters in Paris - another great way to explore the city.

Three gelato cones by Amorino in Paris - they serve the ice cream shaped in the form of roses. What a lovely idea. You can see a short video about it here. 

And finally, three Adirondack chairs on the island of Spiekeroog, Germany. It's time to relax now and enjoy the summer. Please, can I have some Amorino gelato?

You Have To Love Red...

... when you go to London, that's for sure!

There is so much red in London - and it's not a dull or shy red. No, the London red is bold and bright.
Phone booths, mail boxes, buses on busy roads. Red wherever you look.

The tube stations are announced with a bright red circle, and the dominating color at Piccadilly circle is red.

The famous guards at Buckingham Palace wear red uniforms, and of course red is an important color in the  flag of the City of London.

You find red on Tower Bridge as well - like in this image where you can see the middle part of this famous Victorian bridge and the hyper-modern Shard behind it.

Why so much red, one might wonder. While I don't have an answer, I think it's just to set a vibrant accent to the often grey and rainy days. You can see red quite well in the fog!

This one is a classic - I couldn't resist!

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Do you like those red British phone booths?

This set of photo cards is still available in my shop.

All About Fences in Edinburgh

Edinburgh has a lot of fences, but it is easy not to notice them. Most of them are black, and on a rainy grey day they kind of blend in. However, since my eyes seem to be trained on fences - after all it's one of my favorite thing to photograph - I saw many of them - too many to take pictures of them all.

They were all wet and shiny the day we explored Edinburgh. Surprisingly they were all different; I guess fence designers had (and perhaps still have) to be quite inventive. Of course the black looks good with all the old buildings and against the green that seems to be everywhere, in lawns, parks, trees.

If you put a little red phonebooth (aka a pencil sharpener) in between like my daughter did (remember the traveling phonebooth? It came with us), the color really pops, especially on a grey day.

This one probably was my favorite fence, and so I also took pictures of it without the phonebooth.

Beautiful, isn't it? You can spend an entire day in Edinburgh just looking for fences and take pictures of them. If we had had more time...

I like the long spires on this one - and no, this is not the same one as above. The middle spires were set lower in the fence. Little details to set them apart from each other.

This one, though, was the "sharpest" of them all - literally. I discovered it up at the castle, probably used as some kind of defense. It thought it was pretty neat.

What better thing to do with all these fences than linking up to Teresa's "Good Fences" at the Run Around Ranch?

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Fences are also available in my shop -

both as photography prints and as cards.

The Traveling Phonebooth

When we went to the Valley of Fire during Thanksgiving week, Kaefer brought this little British phonebooth with her. It actually is a pencil sharpener - hidden behind the door - that we bought years ago in London Heathrow. She loves to photograph objects in the places we visit. In the summer when we went to BC she brought a toy car (a mini cooper) and took pictures of it everywhere. At that time she still used her compact camera, but this time she learned how to use a DSLR.

Wherever she saw a nice background, she put the phonebooth in place and then tried all kinds of pictures. It was fun to watch her, to see how much she was fascinated by using a big camera and play with it. Oh the possibilities!

Valley of Fire offered many good locations for the little red phonebooth.

Then we went to Death Valley where we stayed close to the Mesquite Dunes which we visited the next morning. Needless to say, the phonebooth was there as well. The funny thing was that other people started to take pictures of the phonebooth as well when they saw Kaefer doing it; one English gentleman suggested to her to ask for a dollar per shot. Brilliant idea!!

No location was too inconvenient or too cold or too hard. She has the right attitude.

And at Lake Tahoe the phonebooth even sat in the snow!