“Lisbon Graffiti #1” — Colorful graffiti on a door in the Alfama district of Lisbon, Portugal.
Here is one more photograph of Lisbon graffiti, this one from a wall next to a sidewalk in the lower Alfama neighborhood. The colors and patterns are so vivid that you might not even notice the doorway in the wall behind the paint. The colors of this street anrt are were perhaps the most intense that I recall seeing.
“Trolleys and Tuk Tuk” — Trolleys, tuk tuk,, and crowds near Miradouro das Portas do Sol, Lisbon.
We walk a lot when we visit cities, and on this Lisbon day we had walked to and then through portions of Alfama. This neighborhood is full of very old streets and buildings. It is built on a hill rising above the water, so many of those lanes are quite steep. Overall it was a slow and mostly quiet walk… until we emerged on this busy street!
“Desert Gold and Mountains” — Rugged desert mountains tower above gravel fans filled with blooming desert gold flowers, Death Valley.
I have been sharing a lot of photographs from this year’s spectacular wildflower bloom in Death Valley National Park — and I’m not quite done yet! In dry years one may have to go off searching (sometimes in vain) for landscape-carpeting flowers like these. But this year, after a previous season of good rainfall the flowers were easy to find.
How easy? I made this photograph just a few minutes from the busy Furnace Creek area. Here the desert gold flowers spilled across a broad wash, past small hills, and on into the more distant wide valley. Beyond are the dark hills at the north end of the Black Mountains.
“Desert Gold and Desert Five-Spot” — Desert gold and desert five-spot flowers, Death Valley
This photograph features two rather different Death Valley flowers. The bright yellow desert gold flowers cover gravel benches and fans after wet winter seasons. They were all over the place when we visited in late February this year. The desert five-sot is not an uncommon flower, though it isn’t seen in anything close to the numbers of the desert gold. It is also less obvious due to its smaller blossoms and darker color.
We had stopped at this location in southern Death Valley to photograph the (very obvious!) desert gold and to look for the also-plentiful sand verbena blossoms. But almost any time you stop for flowers in the park, if you look around you’ll find others besides those you came for — and here that meant we found plenty of desert five-spot flowers nearby.