This series has fewer than 10 remaining chapters.
The next several all look down into water, or through it, or at it.
This chapter’s image was the fruit of looking down into a tidal pool in southeastern Alaska.
Leave a CommentCategory: Americas and Eurasia and Africa
The featured image was not shot in monochrome.
Its colour palette is accurate; if my camera had looked straight up rather than almost straight down, the image would have largely been blue, flecked with white and grey.
I took the photo in a “remote” part of northern Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan province in May 2024.
What appears to be a rock is a rock; I have no idea of its mass, but am sure it would weigh at least several tonnes.
In the context of the relevant valley, however, that rock is a speck!
Leave a Comment
An elevated vantage point sometimes offers an interesting, “different” view of human activity, and the opportunity to record it, candidly.
As the featured activity would suggest, I was looking down to a very “modest” street.
However, my vantage point for all images in this post was the most “desirable” location in Madagascar’s national capital – the royal palace complex, which sits atop the city’s highest hill.
Leave a Comment
With or without a camera to hand, it can be a great pleasure to look down on a “historic” city from a high vantage point, shortly before sunset.
I took the featured photo at 5.54 pm on 11 November 2025.
We were standing on the most elevated “viewing platform” in Córdoba – the upper section of its Cathedral-Mosque’s bell tower.
Leave a Comment
Only very rarely do I photograph food on a plate.
However, at lunchtime on 11 November 2025 in the Spanish, Andalucian city of Córdoba, the pictured salad landed on our table.
It looked uncommonly lovely.
(In our restaurant-dining experiences in Spain, a main course very often proves memorably delicious, but salads and vegetables are all-too-often underwhelming, and/or barely-present)
I picked up the camera, looked straight down, and decided, “if this salad only looks delicious, I’ll delete the photo, pronto”.
Leave a Comment
This post’s featured image was taken just five minutes after the previous one’s.
Beautifully soft late-afternoon/early evening light bathed the landscape – a “softer” landscape than the one we’d been looking at five minutes earlier.
The Taku Inlet (which is the Taku River’s lowermost section, after it encounters the Taku Glacier) below “our” floatplane” was widening, prior to its meeting the ocean.
We would be back in Juneau within five or six minutes.
Leave a Comment
All photos in this post were taken within a few seconds of each other as we flew over the “bottom end” of the Taku Glacier.
Circa 15 minutes later we would be back in Juneau, Alaska’s capital city.
From there, no road will take you out into “wilderness”.
However, by floatplane, an incredible array of “pristine” locations are less than 60 minutes distant – some, less than 30 minutes away from downtown Juneau.
Leave a Comment
The headline refers to area, not population – nobody makes their home atop the Taku Glacier’s surface, which still covers 650-plus square kilometres.
i took this post’s photo at 7.39 pm on 24 April 2015, circa one minute after “our” floatplane lifted off the Taku River, adjacent to Taku Lodge, and we began the return flight to Juneau.
In less than one more minute – as you will see in the next post – we’d be immediately in front of the Taku Glacier’s enormous snout.
This is the world’s thickest mountain glacier, but….
Leave a Comment
Our May 2015 dinner destination – Taku Glacier Lodge, aka “Taku Lodge” – is only 48 kilometres distant from downtown Juneau.
It is, however, genuinely “remote”.
No road reaches it; access is only via floatplane or boat.
The surrounding terrain meets any reasonable definition of “wilderness”.
It includes the world’s thickest alpine glacier, one of its most productive (wild) “salmon rivers” and part of the world’s largest substantially-intact, temperate rainforest.
All of this untamed splendour sits well within Juneau’s “city limits”, which extend to the Canadian border!
In urban reality, Juneau is one of North America’s smaller cities.
However, its designated governance “footprint” makes Juneau – notionally – the second-largest city in all of North America.
Leave a Comment