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Archive for the ‘Photo Friday’ Category

I don’t shoot portraits much at all, much less self-portraits. For some reason, I like shooting landscapes, buildings and food a lot more than taking pix of people. But this is for Photo Friday’s weekly challenge. This week, it’s Self-Portrait.

Here’s one from our recent trip to Florence, Italy, in September. Our room at the Plaza Hotel Lucchesi along the Arno River had a great view of the river and the Piazza de Michelangelo on a hill across the water. We took a bus up there one day and got some amazing photos of the city skyline. See more pix from our trip at my Flickr site.

My dad’s house is in the mountains of California, about an hour west of Fresno, near the Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park. The views are breathtaking. This photo was taken while I was lying on the ground under some huge sequoia trees.

I’m going through my photos from our trip to Ireland in 2003, and came across this one, which is perfect for this week’s Photo Friday challenge theme: Distant.

The Cliffs of Moher on Ireland’s western coast are 800 feet high at their highest point, and five miles long. We were walking up a slate staircase toward a guard house on a hill near the cliffs when I took this picture. Over a hundred years ago, the property owner built a wall of slate there as well, to prevent people from being blown over the cliff by the downdraft.

We were pretty amazed that people were permitted to walk around that hill to go out on that ledge, though. Below is a closeup showing cracking in the rock under his feet.

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland

Fractured Rock, 400 feet up

After all these years in Virginia, I still can’t get used to these wrecks that slowly disintegrate along the sides of country roads. This one is along the road going to James River State Park, where we do the Tye River Kayak/Canoe Race every year.

This is my contribution to the weekly photography challenge at PhotoFriday.com. The topic this week is Slowly.

We grew a nice variety of lettuces in the garden last spring, and most of them did very nicely. We had salad from the garden regularly all spring and into the summer.

This is a composed salad I made one day last summer. Since the high is supposed to be about 42*F today, I’m hoping the thought of a cool salad on a hot day might warm me up. If not, I’ll make some hot chocolate.

This is for Photo Friday’s weekly photo challenge. This week’s topic is Homemade.

This is from the way distant past. About 10 years ago, Dan and I went on a road trip to find the graves of a pair of ancestors of mine: Sarah Jane Glenn Smith and her husband Andrew Jackson Smith. We found them in a little churchyard in Stoneville, North Carolina.

While we were taking pictures, a man asked us which family we were interested in. I told him, and he opened the church and showed us a plaque inside, inscribed: To the Glory of God and in Memory of our Grandfather: Joseph H. Glenn – 1827-1902. He told us that the church and the surrounding land for the graveyard had been donated by Joseph Glenn to the community.

This photo was taken with a 10-year-old digital camera. I have no idea what the make and model were; I imagine the resolution was 640×480 or something similar. I think we need to go back with better cameras

This is for Photo Friday’s weekly photo challenge. The theme this week is “From My Past.”

I was in San Francisco for a conference in 2001 and took this photo from the window of my hotel room. I love San Francisco – one of my favorite cities in the world.

This is my contribution to Photo Friday; the theme this week is Urban Landscape.

My best friend Barbara and I, and sometimes other friends, go out to dinner at a different restaurant almost every Wednesday night; and we buy each other dinner when our birthdays are nearby.

For my birthday this year, we ended up at Gosport Tavern on High Street in Portsmouth. It’s a very nice, fairly new restaurant that specializes in seafood dishes (like many restaurants in our area).

I had the delicious lobster ravioli for dinner that night – OMG – it was really good, and the striped raviolis were beautiful to look at, too I didn’t have my camera, but I did have my cell phone.

This is my contribution to Photo Friday’s weekly photo challenge. This week’s topic is Cameraphone Shot.

I entered this a foodie photo contest for comfort food at Recipezaar.com:

Chicken Cacciatore, oh, yeah! And here’s the recipe that I posted some time ago.

During the last few summers, Dan and I have been going to First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach on Sunday mornings, either to ride our bikes our to hike the trails. This photo is one of our hiking trips when we took Pippen along. The trail is filled with gorgeous cypress swamps.