Weekly Photo Challenge: All-Time Favo(u)rites

Although there are plenty of other photo challenges out there, generously hosted by individual bloggers, the end of the WordPress Weekly Challenge – for reasons best known to themselves and, I suspect, a mystery to most of the rest of us – does feel like the end of an era.

For this final instalment, we’ve been invited to share our all-time favourites (I cannot bring myself to omit the ‘u’ that actually belongs there).

It’s hard to choose, though. The most-liked – by others – of my images are displayed on the home page of this blog in any case.

However, my very first post on this blog, back in August 2013, was a response to a WordPress Weekly Challenge. This is another edit of that image:

Surely, though, while retrospection has its place it’s better to look forward, so I’ll leave you – in terms of this challenge, at any rate – with another flower, but one with it’s – albeit brief – life ahead of it. The picture was taken just a couple of weeks ago.

Weekly Photo Challenge: All-Time

Weekly Photo Challenge: Twisted

The rope twisted into a knot leads the eye in to this detail of a wooden dhow that I spotted in the Bateen area of Abu Dhabi city. The traditional boat is contrasted with the modern office blocks in the background.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Twisted

Weekly Photo Challenge: Liquid

With an exposure of only 1/2000 of a second, this detail of a water feature in Sydney hardly looks liquid at all.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Liquid

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unlikely

Here’s a sight you’re unlikely to see….unless, of course, you happen to be at the annual medieval fair in the nearby village of Rancon.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unlikely

Weekly Photo Challenge: Lines

Strong vertical lines demarcate these bolts of cotton fabric on the shelves of Madame’s favourite shop ever, Classic Quilts in Dubai.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Lines

Weekly Photo Challenge: Awakening

There’s a bit of a story behind this particular image, posted in response to the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge ‘Awakening’.

In October 2004 we came to France with the express purpose of finding a house to buy. We stayed in a gîte – I can’t remember the exact location, but it was somewhere in the Vienne département – and I brought with me my first digital camera, a 3MP Olympus compact (really good lens, by the way).

One morning – upon awakening, you could say – I looked out of the bedroom window and saw the dawn mist in the shallow dip between the hamlet where we were staying and the local village.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Awakening

Weekly Photo Challenge: Smile

Should you ever find yourself in the town of Saint-Junien and need to have a new key cut, this is the place you’re looking for.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Smile

Weekly Photo Challenge: Rise/Set

WordPress wants to see some images of sunrises and/or sunsets for their latest Weekly Photo Challenge.

I don’t have many sunrises, probably because that would involve getting up early. However, in the past I have posted a few sunsets (all the decent ones, it seems) under various threads, so here is a little compendium of a few of the better examples, beginning with the same view that I put up in response to last week’s ‘Favourite Place’ challenge:

More exotically, this was taken on a sunset cruise off Muscat, in Oman:

and this one in the game reserve on Sir Bani Yas Island in Abu Dhabi – the giraffe enclosure, to be exact:

This, though, is probably the most spectacular sunset I’ve ever captured – just outside Beverley, in East Yorkshire:

Weekly Photo Challenge: Rise/Set

Weekly Photo Challenge: Favourite Place

Echoing the theme of ‘Place’ set by Frank at Dutch Goes The Photo! on Tuesday, WordPress’ theme for their latest Weekly Photo Challenge is ‘Favourite Place’.

For the sake of consistency – and because where I am now really is my favourite place – what can I do but post another image of home?

For Frank’s challenge, I showed an image of some trees that form part of the boundary between my two fields. Here, though, is one of those fields, as it was when we first saw it back in 2004.

The wooden fencing has been replaced by the wall seen in the other image, and the sheep – which belonged to our neighbour – have gone. Overall, it looks a little better groomed now than it did back then, although that’s probably only because the growing season hasn’t kicked in properly yet.

Restful (or, as they say round here, ‘tranquille’) isn’t it?

Weekly Photo Challenge: Favourite Place

Weekly Photo Challenge: I’d Rather Be…

The latest WordPress weekly Photo Challenge is a particularly interesting – and difficult – one. We are asked to post an image illustrating what we would rather be doing.

It seems to me that one’s starting point is crucial here. It all rather depends on what I’m doing at the time the question is posed. I can think of lots of things I might (have to) be doing where watching paint dry would be a more acceptable alternative. Equally, there are a few things I would rather be doing than just about anything else.

Neither of these categories, however, really lend themselves to being pictured – and certainly not in the public domain.

The truth is, I would probably rather be taking photographs than anything else: this is, after all, my principal interest. And if I was being more specific, it would be taking photographs of interesting doors.

So this:

Weekly Photo Challenge: Rather