The Old Royal Naval College

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These streets are over 300 years old. The architectire is timeless and to see these buildings on a sunny afternoon is to blink and see the fashions of the 18th century strolling by. Designed by Christpher Wren, they were begun in 1696 as the Greenwich Hospital, and from 1873 to 1998 they housed the Royal Naval College. The Royal College of Music is now in residence. I took this photograph in November, 2007, on a bright Sunday afternoon, and Maritime Greenwich made a considerable impression on me. The shot was a simple frame and shoot, and the image has been cropped for publication (excess sky and foreground trimmed to create a panorama), and the sharpness and colour have been adjusted slightly. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

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

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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.