My New Zealand Photo Adventure
My New Zealand experience was unique. And I had my camera with me to prove it!
For any print on demand products please click here.
My New Zealand experience was unique. And I had my camera with me to prove it!
For any print on demand products please click here.
I donated 3 of my photos to the Art Rangers. They offer the proceeds from the sales of prints of National Park images to National Parks Foundation to preserve them for everyone to enjoy for generations to come. I think theirs is a worthy cause and wish we would have something similar in Australia too.
Here is their link: www.theartrangers.com/
and their FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theartrangers/
These are the photos I donated:
Well, I didn’t win, but I am very excited that I was No 6 and got my name and picture in Australian Photography Magazine – Photographer of the Year Competition. This image is the page from February Issue of the magazine with my pink taxi driver photo in the Travel Category!
You can see more photos of Cuba and the full size of the photo mentioned in the Cuba Travel Gallery on this website or follow the link:
http://danielaphotography.com.au/gallery-cuba.html
Enjoy!
Worked hard to wake up to get there at sunrise, then we kind of got lost a bit due to lack of directional information on the road. And you cannot rely on GPS either.
We got lost and arrived at sunrise at Dead Horse Point instead of Mesa Arch. Well, I said: at least I’ll have some pictures of sunrise here until my husband will go ask for directions. And this was the result:
We still arrived at Mesa Arch, just in time to see the sunlight reflected onto the underside of the arch which was positively glowing red.
Mesa Arch, Canyonlands, Utah, USA.
On the way back we stopped again at Dead Horse Point for a more relaxed photoshoot. The view shows another interesting meander of Colorado River. The point is towering 2,000 feet above the Colorado River and provides a breathtaking panorama of Canyonlands ‘sculptured pinnacles and buttes’. This is an arid desert environment – the park receives less than 10 inches of rain a year.
As we were wandering around my husband found there a tree that looks pretty much like a bonsai, but of course real life-size. He always finds ‘bonsai’ everywhere he travels! It is a gift!
You can see more high-resolution pictures of these amazing places in my American West Travel Photo Gallery or follow this link for prints:
https://2-daniela-constantinescu.pixels.com/collections/us+national+parks
If this can be the highlight of your trip, after you have seen Antelope Canyon… it actually is!
We stayed at the wonderful ‘View Hotel’, which absolutely deserves its name because all the guest rooms have a balcony from which you can enjoy a once in a lifetime opportunity to see – and take pictures of 🙂 the majestic natural monuments, mesas, and buttes, created by erosion in all their glory, at sunrise, sunset or star gazing during the night!
You can take all these amazing photos from the comfort of your own balcony! Starts at night and finishes with the best star trail pictures at night! I had to reduce the video to a reasonable size, so sorry if some quality was lost in the process.
Here is the video/slideshow of our 24-hour stay there. Music is ‘Wish you were here’ by Pink Floyd.
Enjoy!
Antelope Canyon was one of the most amazing places we have seen in our US holiday this year! The slot canyon was formed by erosion of sandstone, primarily by flash flooding, but also the rainwater is cutting into the stone walls, smoothing the hard edges in such a way as to form the “flowing shapes’ in the rock.
It is a spectacular looking place and understandably very popular with photographers, which was a bit frustrating at times. The people running the tours are very nice and they try to accommodate everyone, but in order to do that, they have to rush you through. You can barely catch your breath. And it is not an easy place for taking photographs! I am not only talking about the fact that it is almost impossible to take a picture without lots of people in it. The combination of strong light from above and the darkness inside is very challenging. It is almost impossible to avoid the ‘Hotspots’ even if you bracket your shot.
It is all well worth it, in the end, the stone shapes, the colors, the amazing light! A very interesting phenomenon is the light beam that comes from above at different hours. The tour organizers are throwing sand into the air, so you can see them properly and catch them into your picture… And you have to clean your lens a lot… Here is one of my shots:
My only regret is that we did not have enough time to see the Upper Antelope Canyon only the ‘Lower’ one.
Please check out my galleria for more images of these amazing places!
The next stop after Grand Canyon was the small town of Page where we visited two amazing places: Horseshoe Bend and Antelope Canyon -both breathtaking, ‘WOW’ places, like nothing we have ever seen before. And both posing different challenges for photographers!
At Horseshoe -a meander of Colorado River- you stay on the edge of the cliff and look down approximately 300m, so vast and beautiful! But I was surprised there is nothing to protect you from falling to your certain death, I did not see any rail or any sign of warning… Well, this is probably my Australian mentality speaking, it would be ridiculous to fence out the whole Grand Canyon… It doesn’t make sense…
Anyway, to take my photos, I had to lay down on the ground, close to the edge, hold my camera against a rock so it doesn’t move, to be able to take some handheld bracketed shots. It was fun and I would do it anytime again, I am not afraid of heights (like my mom does!). Believe it or not, I like it! And I was not the only one doing that! Many other people enjoyed themselves, taking selfies ‘on the edge of the cliff’.
Next Post: Antelope Canyon!
Our great adventure trip this year started in February in Mexico and from the beginning, we immersed ourselves in the Maya culture with the first visit at Chichen Itza.
Chichen Itza is the Modern Wonder of the New World, the best-preserved archaeological site in the Yucatan Peninsula.
The main temple, ‘El Castillo’, a 24 m high pyramid was dedicated to Kukulkan, the Maya representation of the god Quetzalcoatl. Its height and striking geometry dominate the whole site. As we know, Mayans were very good astronomers, and their calendar was very similar to what we are using today.
For the people who would like a bit of trivia, here it is: The number of steps of the pyramid is 91 on each of the four sites plus one at the top, which makes 365 days/ year. Mayans periods (months) were only nine, therefore the number of steps of the pyramid.
The most striking for me was ‘The Observatory’ or ‘El Caracol’ (The Snail) – called that because of the spiral staircase – was an astronomical observatory in the times of Maya. You can actually recognize the shape of a modern astronomical observatory! The various slits in the walls correspond to the positions of certain celestial bodies on key dates in Maya Calendar.