Relaxing

WARM SUNSHINE – WHAT COULD BE BETTER?

It’s been a relaxing week in the sunshine – chatting, eating, reading and sightseeing.

Lake Osceola, Winter Park, Florida

 

weekly photo challenge: reflections

This is one of the lakes in Celebration, Florida.

There are more photos of reflections here.

 

travel theme: birds

This week’s theme at Where’s My Backpack is birds.  I had a look through my folders and managed to come up with a few bird photos.

These two rather chilly looking mallards were in Stratford upon Avon last winter.

This heron is waiting patiently at the edge of a lake in Celebration, Florida.

Closer to home for the last picture – this is a mandarin duck on the river in our local park.

Hop on over (or should it be fly over?) to Where’s My Backpack for more photos of birds.

travel theme: sky

This week Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack? has asked us to show photos of sky.

First up is a photo of the sky above Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida.  I wish the camera had managed to capture it as strongly as my eyes saw it, but the top of the cloud in the centre of the picture was rainbow coloured.  I’d never seen an effect like that before.

The next one is a Glasgow sunset.  The colours were so beautiful that I had to stop the car and admire them.

Another sunset now, in Santorini, Greece.

If you have some photos of sky you would like to share with us, go to Where’s My Backpack and join in.

 

travel theme: motion

Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack‘s theme has Motion as this week’s theme.  Here are a couple of my most recent photos, taken when I was in Florida. They didn’t work out quite as I had planned because my camera has decided that it will have a bit of a delay between me pressing the button and the shutter working.

This first one was taken at SeaWorld, Orlando and is a beautiful dolphin in motion –  curving gracefully through the air as it leapt from the water.  Oops.

photo © iusedtobeindecisive

This next one was a blue heron, sitting peacefully beside a small lake in Celebration.  I turned my camera on, focused on the heron, pressed the button and…. in the delay before the shutter operated the heron took off in flight.

photo © iusedtobeindecisive

For some more, more successful I hope, motion photographs go to Where’s My Backpack.

an unusual place for the Berlin Wall

On one of our visits to Universal Studios, Orlando, we discovered a piece of the Berlin Wall.  Not only was it an odd place to find such a thing, but it was tucked away round the corner at the side of the Hard Rock Cafe, in a place where it wouldn’t easily be seen by many passers by.  We found it because we were searching for a Geocache.  If you haven’t heard of Geocaching, it’s an outdoor treasure hunt, where you try to locate hidden containers using a given set of GPS co-ordinates (have a look here for more information).  The co-ordinates led us to this unusual piece of history.  There was no container with this one – we had to answer a few questions about its location, and submit a photo of it with our GPS to be able to claim that we had found it.

photo © iusedtobeindecisive

Here’s a close up of the plaque, with the GPS beside it.

photo © iusedtobeindecisive

I remember all the news coverage when the wall was coming down and people were climbing on it and attacking it with anything they could find.  I was quite surprised to see such a large ‘slice’ of it.  It’s such a significant piece of history that I wonder why it’s not more prominently displayed.

weekly photo challenge: silhouette

I really had to search through my photo folders to come up with something that was a silhouette.  Here are some very unexciting leaves and twigs in silhouette, but they were not the subject of the photo – it was the bright coloured, out of focus blob with the white trail.

photo © iusedtobeindecisive

These photos were taken on September 9th 2006 from Titusville Space View Park, Florida.  This is the space shuttle Atlantis lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center, 15 miles away across the river.  I was on holiday in the area and was really pleased to be able to catch this event because its original scheduled date would have meant I missed it.  We arrived very early in the Park to make sure we got a spot, but we needn’t have worried because there was plenty of space for everyone.  There was a great carnival atmosphere and someone had set up a live audio feed so that we could hear the countdown.  It was a great place to be to watch the launch.

photo © iusedtobeindecisive

photo © iusedtobeindecisive

This post is for the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge.  Click on the link for other bloggers’ photos on the subject.