David Howell Travel Photography and Map Blog

In stone villages ‘your house’ is a section of stone in a long row of connected and stacked residences. But your portion of the wall of stone facing the street can still be very distinctive.

The character can be defined by the color or size of the stones, or by the types of door and window openings, or the color of the shutters, or even by how you display flowers.

On a warm, sunny day like this I don’t think that these guys cared too much about how many fish they caught. In Rio de Janeiro it seems like people have plenty of time to enjoy the ocean and the beaches.

On the busy beaches, like Copacabana and Ipanema, there are football and volleyball games strewn as far as the eye can see….

How’s the commute? Will it be another day of gridlock and anxiety?

My main transportation is a bicycle. It is easy to get around small towns with a bike. It is even easier when towns plan for bicycles and pedestrians.

Even though the street in this photograph is cobblestone there were quite a few bicyclists in this old town section of Bern, Switzerland….

A sunny stroll through wildflower pastures. The sound of clanking cowbells and the thunder of huge waterfalls. The pride of a well-maintained chalet. It is spring in the Swiss Alps.

The walls of the glacially-carved Lauterbrunnen Valley launch many snow-melt waterfalls in the spring. In fact the word Lauterbrunnen means many fountains.

OK, photography won’t solve climate change or reduce our dependence on petroleum. It won’t provide new jobs or feed hungry families. This one job doesn’t do that much to feed my family either.

So why spend days planning and hours shooting photographs? Is it really work if you enjoy it? What is the value? Are you contributing anything?

If you will excuse a somewhat personal and serious posting, I wanted to talk about these issues from my perspective. I used to be a soil scientist. Now I am a photographer….

I climbed this little tree in the middle of the stream and tried to balance while taking this time exposure. It was hard to hold the camera still, especially when the branch broke….

OK, that is a lie. But sometimes it is fun to make up stories to anwser the question, “How did you take that photo?”

The combination of vantage point and composition can hide the real answer and create curiosity….

It took days for the weather to cooperate, but only minutes for this perfect cloud to drift behind an infamous, crooked, lead steeple.

Every small stone village we visited in northern Brittany (France) was formed around its ancient cathedral. The dull gray, brown, or pink stone buildings were accented with brightly painted shutters and flower baskets. The dominant local stone is a pink granite. This area is part of the Côte de Granit Rose (Pink Granite Coast).

Several generations had passed through this chateau before Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America.

The chateau served as a strong point on the shore of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) during hundreds of years of armed struggle. It is situated in Yvoire, France, east of Geneva, Switzerland on the south shore of the lake….

This is a department store. We are trying to sell socks and batteries. Is there really time and space for art?

One of my current favorite authors, Edith Wharton, was a New Yorker by birth, but spent many years traveling and writing about what she learned. She felt that “…the French are a race of artists: it is the key that unlocks every door of their complex pyschology [sic]…” (French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919). Perhaps this sounds like an overly generalized stereotype. But I think that it is hard not to see the justification for the statement if you spend time in France, especially Paris.

Walking through parts of Paris you can see artistic planning and composition….

Before dawn I was planning a day at “The Top of Europe”. I went to the mountain train station to check the weather forecast and look at the video displays from the top stations.

But it was going to be a very windy, stormy day on the summits. All the views were obscured by clouds. I would not be going to Jungfraujoch that morning.

It is hard to have a bad day in the Swiss Alps. So we rode the train down from Wengen to the valley below….