Showing posts with label castle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label castle. Show all posts

Sunday, April 5, 2009

In the time warp ... Adelaide, of course!

mediaeval-exterior
Click here to view at 1000 pixels wide.

Architecture fascinates me, with the way it pretends to be anywhere but where it is, and in any time period but our own. And nowhere in the world is more of an architectural time warp than the North Terrace area of Adelaide, South Australia. In five hundred meters, you can see 1970s modernism, Romanesque frontages, nineteenth century colonial Australian, eighteenth or nineteenth century British India ... and then you get along to Adelaide University, and -- dang! This one is pretending to be a fifteenth century castle. It's absolutely magnificent. These are the hallowed 'halls of learning,' of which students and visitors can tell you a few rare stories! The image was easy to capture, just a question of getting close enough to put the sun just behind the roof there. This threw the building into silhouette and burned out the sky, of course, but this was easy to fix at the software level later. I might have stuck around and done the perfect manual exposure, but to get this shot at all was a question of patience: taxis backing in and out, students by the thousand trooping by. Eventually, you grab what you can and enhance it later. Thank heavens for digital photography! Photo by Mel, 2009.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Stone, Sea and Sky



Click image to view at 800 pixels wide

This is a technically simple shot, frame and shoot, no exposure issues, nothing fancy about backlighting or lens flare. The subject matter is what makes it: this is Scarborough Castle, on the North Sea coast of Yorkshire, UK, which has commanded the bays to each side of its headland since the Middle Ages, now somewhat in ruins but remaining an impressive sight hunched on the headland above the popular Victorian holiday town. Through the arch you see the next bay, with all its modern residential and commercial development, and once again it's an example of the new and the old, side by side. England is one of those countries where the tangible remains of centuries gone by are right there to see, where history really is alive in the everyday experience of life. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. November, 2007. Image by Mike.