“Bench, Wall With Fado Tiles” — A bench on a slanted sidewalk and a wall with Fado tiles, Lisbon.
I love little off-kilter scenes like this one. In the center are two tile illustrations of the fado music tradition of Portugal. (The tiles were seen in an earlier post on this website.) They are aligned to perfect verticals and horizontals. But everything else tilts — the bench on the cobbled sidewalk, the pipe that frames the image, the wiring attached to the walls. A door at the left, barely intruding into the frame, is the only other thing that lines up.
“Panamint Valley” — View across Rainbow Canyon toward the flats of Panamint Valley.
Death Valley National Park is a huge landscape, in more ways that one. The park is huge. It is the largest park in the contiguous states. (Alaska, where everything is on a larger scale, has four larger parks.) Within the park we often are able to view huge distances — in fact, Death Valley’s visual scale reminds me of places I’ve seen in Alaska. Here we look down Rainbow Canyon and across the entire Panamint Valley (one valley west of Death Valley itself) toward more desert mountains.
“Fado Tiles, Lisbon” — Fado tiles on a wall along a sidewalk in the Alfama neighborhood, Lisbon
I found these beautiful little tiles on a wall along a street in the Alfama neighborhood of Lisbon. The truth of the matter is that I made a photograph of the wall, only barely aware of the tiles, and then took a closer look at them while working on the larger image in post. They appear to have been created by the same artist/craftsperson, judging by the signature, and I think they are relatively contemporary.
Although it might see counter-intuitive for a place like Death Valley National Park, these mountains typically are snow-capped in the winter. The highest point in the Panamint Range is Telescope Peak, at an elevation of just above 11,000′. That puts it in the alpine zone, and although moisture is usually scarce here, when it does come it can produce snow at that elevation. A cold storm had recently passed, and the snow level in the photo is lower than usual.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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