Photo Monday: Siracusa

Here are some more pictures from our Perth to Exmouth tour; these are from Sicily as well, this time from the awesome Siracusa. I wish I could go there right now. It has never been easier to find your perfect holiday. Do you want to explore new travel destinations? There is no better way than doing it than in a holiday home, Interhome.co.uk they were inspired by our travel ideas and book online with us – it is quick, easy, and secure.



Photo Monday: Taormina


This Christmas I made my family Blurb books from some of our past vacations. I had such a good time going through literally thousands of pictures — though it did take forever. I thought it would be fun to share them here, so I’ll be uploading some of them over the next few days. one thing i remember from this vacations was the Sicily flights can be expensive but totally worth it. This first bunch is from Taormina, Sicily.






Flickr Mondays—Cuba Gallery


Since tomorrow is the first official day of Summer and the weather is remarkably beautiful today, I thought New Zealand based photographer Andrew Smith’s (AKA CubaGallery) work would be perfect. He has a great sense of color and composition and these images make me want to run around outside. Cuba Gallery also has a blog where he talks about his post-production techniques using Adobe Lightroom and shows some pretty impressive before-and-after images for his photographs.



Etsy Schmetsy: Crafty Mapsy

We love to travel and it is no secret that we love maps (we’ve posted about them a whole bunch in the past). I also love seeing how many fantastic ways etsy sellers are making maps — from pillows to prints, paint-by-numbers to cut paper, here are some really awesome mappy finds.





Row 1: World Metro Map pillow from atelierpompadour; Vintage Paint-by-number USA from somethingshidinghere; Heart Strings Map Pillow from FelixStreetStudio

Row 2: Typographic World Map from designahoy; Map of USA Necklace from ilgattoselvatico

Row 3: Customizable USA Pillow from lovecalifornia; Chalkboard United States map from shopdirtsa; Stay Golden California pillow from sundaymorningpaper

Row 4: San Francisco mapcut from studiokmo; The Roadtrip print from JanuaryJonesPrints

Flickr Mondays-Julian Chams

Sorry for the lack of posting for Flickr Mondays…work has been insanely busy lately. Hope this image make you smile.

More photos here.

Flickr Mondays…just a bit delayed.

These photos that Andrea McQuade took of her trip to Iceland confirm my thoughts of wanting to visit. I can’t get over how untouched and beautiful the natural landscapes are.

More photos here.

Corrine Vionnet: Photo Opportunities

Corrine Vionnet’s series Photo Opportunities is a collection of pieces on iconic landmarks, each one composed of hundreds of self-similar tourist photographs layered together into a new composition.

While the three essays she reproduces on her site focus on the sightseers/tourists and their consistent, shared, unimaginative “shared memory” view of the monuments, I am more interested in the layers of meaning that can be extracted from the finished pieces.

The effect of the dissolution and blur on these icons sometimes works to invoke  associations: Big Ben for instance is lost in the fog, while the Twin Towers are lost in grief.

The way that the photos are layered also creates some interesting readings, especially in the ones with very clear focal points where the pictures are registered. The cooperative tourist shots combined do what a single one cannot: make into a beacon the portrait of Mao in the Forbidden City, make a grinding gyre around the black rock at Mecca, or complete the Colliseum. Interestingly, there most photographers choose an angle that shows its damage — the aesthetic normative — and the small group that shoot from another angle fill in ghostily what the eye can only imagine.

And my favorite layer of meaning: some seem to consciously refer to or homage art history. Clearly the whole project is a variant of cubism, assembling different views, but the dynamism referenced in the Golden Gate Bridge composition is apparent: compare to Balla’s Dynamism of Dog on a Leash. Likewise, you can’t assemble hundreds of pictures of Mt. Fuji without referring to Hokusai. Her composition, like his series of prints, seems to show Fujiyama as being a constant, unchanging icon while the days, nights, seasons and crowds change around it. The blurry Eiffel Tower in a series of chromatic greys looks all the world like a piece of lost Impressionism – Caillebotte‘s pallete and Monet’s brush? And the texture at the bottom/foreground of the Matterhorn piece feels remarkably like the scraped brushwork of a late modern painter like Kiefer.

One of the primary instigators of early modern painting was photography’s effortless encroachment into the realist space painting had long occupied. With these recombined works, Vionnet collages cliché photography into something that recapitulates the project of modern painting: expressing different aspects of time, light and viewpoint, abstracting and dissolving its subjects into impressions, thumbing its nose at photography which can only represent realistically a single moment.

15 more plus essays at Vionnet’s site.

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