Settling back into the studio after essentially being on the road since May is great but also filled with realisation of how stuff somehow needs to be attended to… Windows updates. Cleaning (somehow!), life admin… but then the fun creative stuff can begin again. Yay! Big plans are a cookin’.
Here’s an image from a really cool market in Marrakech. It was so vibrant and interesting with a huge variety of things to buy. Food, lanterns, electronics, fabric, threads and more… speaking of Threads, I’ve just crossed 10k followers over on the new platform. It’s been great so far. Much more civil than Twitter, way less drama and no ads (so far!). Come check out my account and follow if you’d like to receive my random musings each day. 🙂
This is my friend Bel doing a bit of impromptu yoga on the Hobbiton Movie Set on the old stone bridge before the watermill. That Bel, doesn’t matter where you are with her there is at least one point in every day where you’ll randomly turn around to find her in some crazy yoga situation!
I was at the Summer Palace to go up on stage for an opening ceremony event, and there were a bunch of these guys on the perimeter keeping the peace. It was quite a docile crowd, really, so they weren’t really needed and that gave me the opportunity to wander round and get some portraits.
The “floor” in these abandoned buildings in Namibia, isn’t really the floor, it’s an accumulation of sand over time that is slowly filling the structures. I assume that if I were to return sometime in the future, I’d find the whole place gone. Consumed by the desert, waiting for a future civilisation to find once we’re all gone.
In the Guanxi province there are the same sort of rock formations as the Grand Canyon, with one exception, there is vegetation here. It holds together a lot of the rock so it is eaten away at a much slower pace, forming these amazing archipelagos in the sky.
Now here, somewhat above Chefchaouen, is a place where the military police shut us down with our quadcopter! I came into town with Anton and Ana from SmugMug to work on a promo piece. We had been already using Anton’s quadcopter all over Morocco, but when we got here, the taxi driver alerted the local military police that we had some sort of a “plane”! This caused a lot of worry and consternation (and, I should add, a significant amount of confusion). After we were there for half an hour, the military police descended on our hotel with a rather sour attitude. I’ve never had any success negotiating with the Moroccan military, and I had no success here either. I did put up a good intellectual fight, but I eventually acquiesced, mostly because of the size of their guns. Well, there was no gunplay… but I did see a lot of guns… which always helps one side win an argument. So, while I’d like to have had a proper shot from the air, it was not to be!
One of the craziest things about Burning Man was when, during the burn, huge gas bombs explode suddenly and send shockwaves through your body. It gets me every time. It’s both scary and awe-inspiring and results in huge black boiling clouds that tear up into the sky being illuminated by the fireworks and lasers of the event.
In yesterday’s post I mentioned the changes in the landscape color as autumn rolls in here in Queenstown and that the sunsets can really start to go up a gear. That photo was taken one March and the greens there are pretty much replaced by the middle of April every year. It happens fast but it’s epic, especially in the trees around Arrowtown!
Soaring over the city of Dubai in a helicopter with the wind whipping all around I could feel the adrenaline coursing through me. It’s such an amazing way to see most cities but Dubai was even more interesting than many. The massive skyscrapers, gleaming white buildings, sparkling canal and Palm Jumeirah, an artificial archipelago shaped like a palm tree surrounded by crystal-clear water. I’m always so impressed by Dubai. It’s a city that is constantly growing and evolving, and it’s always full of surprises and you never know what new aspect you’ll see from the ground, or above.
