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Happy Monday Everyone! Hope you had a nice weekend and start of the week. Has anyone tried the new Reels feature of Instagram? how do you find it? Apologies that I haven’t posted as frequently lately but I have a few projects that I’m working on at the moment and it’s hard to find time to do other stuff. My question about the Instagram Reels is because I have been testing it lately and I’m not sure wether I like it or not. One of the projects that I’m working on at the moment is a Tik Tok Masterclass, and Reels is Instagram’s Tik Tok alternative but I feel like there are missing a few crucial things for it to take off. The photo I’m posting today is from #Dunes of the #Maspalomas in #GranCanaria, although it might look like you are in the Sahara desert, these dunes were formed by sand from the now subdued marine shelf, when it was laid dry during the last ice age and the wind blew the sand towards the coast of the island, they are a big contrast from the otherwise ragged volcanic scenery that is typical from the islands. Today they are partly protected and it’s one of the most popular natural treasures in Spain. These dunes frame a long golden sand beautiful beach that is one of the most popular in the islands. Have a great Monday! (at Dunas de Maspalomas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CERPdyGltr7/?igshid=1ulyxs2cr1inn

#dunes #maspalomas #grancanaria

Happy Wednesday Everyone! Hope you are having a great week. Do you have any special memories from any of your recent trips? Back in London is a bit of a contrast from my previous week as today is very grey and raining in London, hopefully it’ll be like the last couple of days where it’s cleared up to the most wonderful sunsets in the evening. Unfortunately I can’t go out as I’m quarantined so I can’t take photos this days. Talking about sunsets and continuing on the last posts trend of the Canary Islands, this photo is from Lanzarote from a trip earlier this year. I go to Lanzarote every year with my very good friend @neilmitchel.1, whose birthday is today btw so this post is dedicated to him. We usually go sometime in the first months of the year for a fitness reboot at this sports complex called @clublasanta, on our free time there that is not much we do some tourism around the Island and you can see how unique it is in some of my previous posts. In fact my most reposted photo ever is from this same trip. On our first night there we had this amazing sunset with the sun shinning through the clouds and reflecting on the sea, and even though we were not in the most photogenic place I had to take a photo of it. We had been doing several sports activities during the day and I wanted to go out of the club and take some photos of the volcanic beaches that are near the club. Neil was patient enough to wait for me to take photos of the area until the sun started setting in the horizon, it was the perfect ending of a tiring day with a great friend! Hope you have a great rest of your day! (at la boca de abajo) https://www.instagram.com/p/CEEdqIxF7ex/?igshid=goy6lwncd5ol

Happy Monday Everyone! Hope you are having a nice start of the week. Sorry for the lack of posts lately but as I mentioned in my last post I went on holiday on a trip to the Canary Islands in Spain. I went to Tenerife and Gran Canaria and I must say I had a wonderful time, it was really nice to be able to travel again. Unfortunately there is a quarantine on people travelling from Spain which has hurt the Spanish economy greatly as businesses were prepared for tourism that had booked already their holidays and had to cancel in the last minute. So I’m going to try to help as I can by showing you the wonderful places I saw throughout a series of posts. Aside from the quarantine, I must say that what I found there is that people are extremely careful, everyone wears a mask everywhere they can’t guarantee a safety distance. So from my trip to the Canary Islands I’m going to start by showcasing Tenerife in today’s post. I must say that all the photos I’m posting I took them with my phone (as I haven’t had time to edit the ones from my camera) so they are not as crisp as the DSLR one but still wonderful.. If you have never visited #Tenerife, then you are in for a treat when you go. This time we stayed in a place called Callao Salvaje, a small area with the most wonderful black volcanic beach with crystal clear turquoise waters against rock walls that were formed by lava cooling down in geometric shapes 1000s of years ago. As you can see in the photos we had the beach almost entirely for ourselves and it was wonderful. We also went to visit Teide’s National Park that had had amazing out-of-this-world beautiful landscapes that looked like you were on Mars. As a curiosity the first photo is of a rock and the tallest peak in Spain the Teide, this exact angle used to be featured in the Spanish money bills before the Euro. Coming down from the Teide area you have to literally drive through the clouds. They stay between 900 mts and 1600 mts above sea level, creating this ghostly misty landscape that is really cool. I can’t wait to edit the photos that I took with my DSLR camera and show you! Have a great Monday! (at Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain) https://www.instagram.com/p/CD_UahGl2Oq/?igshid=4mibt8e8gp67

#tenerife

Happy Monday Everyone! Sorry for the lack of posts these couple of days. Reason for my silence is that I'm on my first holidays since the lockdown!! Thanks to my amazing friend @madtolon who has taken me to the #canaryislands for my birthday. Yes, I changed numbers this past weekend and we've come to Gran Canaria and Tenerife to celebrate it. I'll have to quarantine when I get back, which is silly because people here are a lot more careful and there are a lot less cases than in London, but who understands politics nowadays. What I've seen is that that move from UK's government has harmed an already hurt economy in a very difficult time. So I'm glad we came. The Canary Islands are always a wonderful destination, almost 100% guaranteed good weather all year round, amazing beaches, great food and really friendly people. At the moment they are quite strict about wearing masks, and safety distances but that makes you feel safer. I'll be posting some photos of the cool places I'm visiting in the near future. I took this photo from the plane as we were approaching Gran Canaria, I loved the contrast between the clean deep blue colour of the see and the isolation of the white cargo ship. Hope you have a great Monday (at Gran Canaria) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDs7vKvlRZa/?igshid=1llybrj713gd6

#canaryislands

Happy Friday everyone! What's everyone up to this weekend? Today I'm posting a photo I took from last Friday when I visited Dover. Ever since I moved to the UK I wanted to visit the chalk cliffs and I hadn't gotten around to do it, so in my bid to do more local tourism in the UK and Spain, I finally booked a train ticket and went to Dover. I must say the UK has some of the most wonderful sceneries and the White cliffs are one of them. The trek to get there was not complicated but on a hot day like it was you need to make sure you bring plenty of water, otherwise you can easily dehydrate and have to cut your trip short. That was almost my case, and by the time I got back to the city I was gasping for water and raided the supermarket like it was the end of the world. The white cliffs are really beautiful and the colour contrast with their grassy tops renders the scenery even prettier. Not the easiest to photograph as at the end of the day the white rocks provide little contrast with the sky. If you are up for a bit of exercise you can go down through a quite steep pathway and old metal ladder which is how I got to take this photo. Hope you have a great weekend everyone! (at White Cliffs of Dover) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDlRBCqFyWm/?igshid=12ptb8qn9l3r8

Happy Wednesday Everyone! Hope you are having a nice week. Today I’m in a cheesy mood, hence the photos I’m posting. As I’m taking the current situation as an opportunity to explore more UK and Spain, my two home countries, so the other day I did a little afternoon trip from London. This is not the first time I post about my obsession with lavender. During lockdown I used a lot of lavender essential oil to help me relax and have a good night sleep (It definitely works). After seeing photos of the lavender fields in the french Provence posted online I wanted to to find a good lavender field with combed rows of lavender that I could photograph. As it turns out I didn’t need to go to France for it, there are at least a couple of lavender farms near London that are amazing! I already posted photos from the #MayfieldLavender Farm and last week I visited the @hitchinlavender farm. First of all, the day was amazing, I couldn’t have hoped for a better weather to visit the farm, and the good thing about visiting the farm was that the visits were scheduled in time slots, so although it was crowded, the farm was not heaving with people. I was one of the first ones to go in so I managed to take some really nice photos of the lavender rows going uphill (nothing to envy the Provence ones!), but also this time I took my time to sit and enjoy the smell in the air, the beauty of the fields and everything that was going on around me. Because I was in the last shift of the day, just when they were about to close, suddenly I saw this beautiful moon in the sky while people where heading out to leave the fields, it really was beautiful but as it often happens, the reality that you capture in the camera doesn’t always reflect what you feel at the moment, so the cheesy side of me decided to fantasise with the photo and blow up the moon to make a more otherworldly photo of the field (hope you don’t mind the surrealism of it). Taking photos of the moon with a lens that doesn’t have a stabiliser is no easy task, but I’m happy how it came out, sometimes it’s important to let your imagination go and dream of things that are not real. Have a great day! (at Hitchin Lavender) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDgKabXFRXx/?igshid=136831efzbf5f

#mayfieldlavender

Happy Tuesday Everyone! hope you are having a nice week. I started to write the caption of this photo and I realised I went deep, a bit too deep! and that was not my intention for today’s photo. So I scraped it and started new. I have been toying with this photo for years, I smack myself in the head for not taking the opportunity of taking a better photo when we were in such a beautiful location, but I realised I have never posted a photo of a #Waterfall so here it is. This photo is from 2014, on our visit to Mexico (wow time flies!). This waterfall is called Misol-Ha and it’s near palenque. The drop is 35 mts and it’s surrounded by such lush vegetation that it creates a perfect frame for such wonderful the blue of the water, which has that colour because of the high concentration of minerals in it. But there is a sad part to it, according to our guide, this paradise is constantly threatened by the Palm Oil industry, they burn the local vegetation to dedicate the land to the growing of palms to produce palm oil and with this they completely obliterate the ecosystem here. Palm oil has been and continues to be a major driver of deforestation of some of the world’s most biodiverse forests, destroying the habitat of already endangered species. The problem is that palm oil is a big portion of the GDP of many developing countries and there is no other oil that is as efficient. As consumers we should also be worried about palm oil not only because of the disastrous effects in the environment, it is also bad for your health as it has a high saturated fat content, which can be harmful to cardiovascular health. When consumed in moderate quantities it shouldn’t be a problem but the problem is that palm oil is almost everywhere!! So we should start consuming less of the brands that use palm oil, at least the ones that don’t use a responsible source kind. If you want to check if your favourite brand is using responsible sourced palm oil head to the following link: http://palmoilscorecard.panda.org/ Have a great day! (at Misol Há) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDdqfGzlGhD/?igshid=1b5iimwu9k7o6

#waterfall

Happy Monday Everyone! Hope you had a nice weekend and a nice start of the week. I had a busy weekend working on other projects so I haven’t had much time to edit photos, but today I wanted to post a photo of this cave in Bali. Goa Gajah, or the Elephant Cave as it’s referred to, is a short trip from Ubud and although there is not a lot more to see than the cave and the ancient ponds next to it, I did find it ver peaceful and wondering the nature that surrounds it was really beautiful. Why do they call it the Elephant Cave? To be honest I don’t know, they say that the main face you can see carved in the entrance is that of an Elephant but either Elephants were very different in the XI Century when it was built or I just don’t see the resemblance. What do you think it looks like? Have a great day! (at Goa Gajah Gianyar Bali) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDbI3n0FWIE/?igshid=1ad946c13h5hh

Happy Wednesday Everyone! hope you are having a great week. Do you have a list of places that you want to visit again? The photo today is from one of the places that I’ve visited that has surprised me the most: #Sardinia and in particular this town called #Castelsardo . As you can see from my last post about Sardinia, the sunsets that I saw in the Island were amazing and this one couldn’t be any more striking. I love Italy (who doesn’t), the food, the people, the culture, etc. When I visited Sardinia I had no expectations, I have a friend that is from there and when I visited he gave me a lot of great tips and one of them was to visit this town in the northwest part of the Island. Bear in mind that you have to be in good shape because the climbing up and down the hill is no easy feat but every corner of this town was an opportunity to take a great photo. I visited this place on my own and although I wished I had my friends with me to see how beautiful it was, when photography is your hobby it can be a bit difficult to ask your friends constantly to stop to take a photo (although my friends are very patient with that), so this time I took advantage of being by myself to take all the photos that I wanted and even try new techniques. One history fun fact about this town is that it was the last Spanish stronghold in the the Island of Sardinia from the 15th century until the 18th century, perhaps that’s the reason why I felt so at home in this island, as the culture and customs here felt very similar to home . Sardinia is definitely one of the places I want to go back to. Hope you have great day! (at Sardegna Castelsardo) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDOGTjylY1C/?igshid=z8akkdk40jj6

#sardinia #castelsardo

Happy Monday Everyone! hope you had a nice start of the week. TodayI felt like I needed to post something about a calming and relaxing place and one of the best places I could think of was the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest in Kyoto. Ok, it really depends on when you visit it as it can be heaving with tourists but if you are lucky it can be one of those places where you really feel a calming and soothing energy flowing. Just imagine, the wind blowing through the bamboos while you close your eyes, let the sounds of the leaves and the bamboos swaying while the sun moves along the intricate textures of the bamboo branches. Just the thought of it helps me relax. In the world we live in and especially in the times we live in, learning how to relax and meditate is really important, otherwise the lizard part of our brain, the amygdala will be in a constant fight or flight response with the consequence of keeping us in a heightened state of alert. This has a whole lot of bad implications for our minds and our health, even though we may not recognise it at the time. So learning how to relax and recuperate our center is not just something for yogis or health conscious people, it’s a necessity for all of us. It’s not always easy, I’m particularly finding it hard at the moment, but even more so when it’s the most difficult that’s when we need to make sure we are the strongest against that lizard in our brain Hope you have a great Monday! (at Arashiyama Bamboo Forest) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDJB_pvFOMd/?igshid=1y5rq9bwkwb6

Happy Friday Everyone! Today I’m going to deviate a bit from my usual postings and I’m going to post photos that I took this morning. So the trip today is 5 minutes from home to Victoria Park in London. This past week I have been dog-sitting Skipper, I haven’t posted photos of her in a long time so for those of you who don’t know her, she’s my friend’s @neilmitchel1 ’s dog but when he’s not around I pretend she’s mine and show off her cuteness around. I love animals in general but dogs are just my weakness and Skipper the leader among the canine kingdom, she just melts my heart. You really can’t have a bad day when she’s around. Fun fact! Skipper is the inspiration of the logo of my company @loudvoicedigital and she’s also heavily featured in our “Mobile Photography Masterclass”, that’s how important she is! The other photos I’m posting are a collection of prints I’m preparing for my print shop which I also happened to shoot this morning, I’m pretty happy with the results and greens are not my strongest colour when it comes to editing (thanks @anton.wilk for your guidance on this!). These will be sold as a limited set of 3 once my shop is open, if anyone is interested DM to be advised when they are released. Hope you have a great day everyone, and don’t worry I’ll be posting more travel photos soon! (at Victoria Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDBtdb7FyUG/?igshid=871il9gbnv24

Happy Thursday Everyone! I’m quite late today in my posting and it’s because I’be been working hard on setting up my print’s shop. I’ve had this photo for a while, I kept editing it but never really felt like it fit m Instagram feed, but when setting up the prints shop it fit right in the Architecture section along with the Skyscrapers photo that I posted a few days ago. This is a photo pf the Umeda Sky Building in #Osaka. The geometry of the building makes it very interesting, it’s like it’s built with lego pieces, but what I enjoyed the most were the hanging escalators that you can see crossing the top hole, the go through see-through tunnels where you can admire the height of the building. Hope you have a great day! (at Umeda, Osaka, Japan) https://www.instagram.com/p/CC_CgBJlhX3/?igshid=1wj7l3w45zygd

#osaka

Happy Wednesday Everyone! #Sunset time!! I was going through the 1000s of photos that I take during my trips and I'm trying to salvage some of them. Maybe I thought they were good at the time but when I look at some of them I can’t help to think “What was I thinking?”, sometimes I feel like a lost a lot of opportunities to take a good photo in a wonderful scenery. Today I want to reflect on making mistakes. I was brought up in a culture where making mistakes was the worst thing you could do. As an example, I got my first camera ever , a small Kodak one, when I was 6 years old. One of my most memorable gifts from my grandmother. For me it was like the gift of magic, I could capture in time the world around me, things that I found beautiful or important to me, so I took photos of: A plant pot in my terrace, the wall outside my window that had some graffitis and my favourite toy (earnie from sesame street). I quickly run through the 16 photos available in the roll (yes, this is way before digital photography). I was impatient for my father to develop the roll, but when he did he got so upset that I had taken photos of what seemed to him “worthless things” that he took the camera away from me and never saw it again. My point here is that it would have been better, even as a little kid, to challenge me, to learn what was wrong with the photos and to gain a level of consciousness about improving that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. it’s not a coincidence that the most resilient people are the ones that are not afraid to make mistakes, because they take them as a step and valuable lesson in their learning process. I feel that at least in my generation there was a lack of understanding just that. I believe that teaching yourself the process of failing, analysing the mistakes and learning from them is the key to have a happier and more fulfilling life. I took this photo on a sunset in Gili Trawangan near Bali and it's actually a crop from a photo that I failed at, the lightning wasn’t right, the camera settings weren’t right, even the composition wasn’t right. I tried to fix it to get the best possible result, but now I know how to get it right next time. (at Gili Trawangan) https://www.instagram.com/p/CC8Rtwjlv97/?igshid=19lgrngl4cjr

#sunset

Happy Tuesday Everyone! Any of you is on holiday at the moment? I’m not. There is a traditional Spanish song that says “Sevilla tiene u color especial” (Seville’s colour is special), I’m not a huge fan of the song but I am a big fan of the city. It is a gorgeous city and you can feel that people from Seville are proud of it, as they care for it, maintain it clean and they speak wonders about their own city, to a point that sometimes can seem cocky. When you visit the city you realise that everything they say is true. This makes me think about pride, what a strange thing pride is. Too much of it can be off-putting but too little of it will put people off for sure. Sometimes the opposite of pride is humility, but the lack of it can be seem as false humility. It’s one of those things that it’s difficult to get the balance of. I’ve interviewed a lot of people for jobs and one thing that I would notice is when people were proud of themselves, what they have achieved and most of all what they could achieve. To me as an interviewer, it was definitely a positive thing. Then why is it so hard sometimes for us to feel proud! Doing a bit of research and this is what I’ve found out the concept of “pride” means psychologically: Pride is an emotional state deriving positive affect from the perceived value of a person or thing with which the subject has an intimate connection. They key word here is “positive”. As you might have noticed I have been posting lately how my photos would look as framed prints hanging on walls, the reason why I’m doing that is because I’m setting up my photography online print shop and when doing it, I have to make a bog conscious effort to quiet down my inner saboteur, that may or may note tell me that I’m or they are not good enough. I’ve been a freelance for 5 years and by far the most difficult part of it is using my pride to be able to offer my services to clients, to a point that it can hinder my possibility of reaching out or acquiring new clients. It’s a constant battle and I’m curious if any of you also have a similar battle with your own self-saboteur , This is a photo of the wonderful Sevilla Have a lovely day! (at Giralda) https://www.instagram.com/p/CC500XwFHDi/?igshid=ux7sauix1uvb

Happy Monday Everyone! Hope you are having a nice start of the week. Short post today, no mysteries or ancient ruins, actually quite the opposite. A landscape that is very close to home, the City of London. A photo I took about a month ago when Lockdown started easing and the weather was beautiful. (at The City) https://www.instagram.com/p/CC3NGWulX0Z/?igshid=16r47mhg69ppi

Happy Sunday Everyone! And today I’m taking you to another mystery in a different side of the world. The Bayon Temple in Angkor Thom in Cambodia. This temple is also know as the Faces Temple. The mystery here is who those faces belong to, but I’ll talk a bit more of that later on. First I would like to talk about my personal experience with this temple. The first time I visited it was in 2007 and I have been there three other times ever since and every single time I have felt the spirituality of this temple like I have never felt it anywhere else. Maybe it’s because of all those gentle faces that watch over you in every corner of the temple from above, but the truth is that there is something especial about this temple. The temple had 37 towers with faces (originally it had 49), most of them being crowned with 4 faces although some only have 3 and one of them has 1. If you stare at those faces you will notice the serenity, the peace that they exude, it’s almost like watching someone sleep a peaceful sleep to a point that even though they are made of several pieces of rock, there is a humanity to them. There are many theories as to what these faces are, some archeologist believing that they represent Lokeshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, while others think it’s the face of the king that built the temple: Jayavarman VII. There are 216 faces carved into the stones that make up the 54 towers of the Bayon Temple. Many compare the serene and happy look of the faces to the Mona Lisa. The face temple,” as it’s also known for, was built in the XII century and it exudes both power and humanity, two essential qualities of any successful leader and it symbolises both the strength and compassion of the Khmer Empire and the king himself If you ever visit this temple, close your eyes, forget about the other tourists and let your other senses experience what for me is always a very unique and beautiful experience. Have a great day! (at Bayon Temple, Siem Reap) https://www.instagram.com/p/CC0quhil8Hn/?igshid=tgzlqx54nqnr

Happy Thursday Everyone! Today I’m choosing a photo of another mystery site the Urquhart Castle situated in the shores of Loch Ness. I asume all of us have heard of the mystery of the Monster of the Loch Ness or as close friends and acquaintances call her Nessy! I love Scotland, it has some of the most breathtaking scenarios in the UK and a few years ago when we organised a trip with my mum to go to Scotland we had to make a stop at the Lock Ness, which let’s be honest has been uncanny at marketing themselves as a site of mystery, with sightings and sonar detections of the alleged monster. In 1994 Christian Spurling, whose stepfather Marmaduke Wetherell was a friend of Wilson’s, the first person to take a photo of the monster and probably the most famous one, said that his stepfather and Wilson arranged the stunt. Wetherell had been the subject of public ridicule in 1933 after he found what he thought to be series of giant footprints on a Lochside beach and claimed they were proof there was something out there, they were actually just marks of an umbrella stand. Spurling confessed before he died that the picture was of a toy submarine with a fake head attached and was staged to take revenge for his stepfather’s humiliation. Regardless of wether there is a Monster or not, the lake is gorgeous, a really beautiful site and worth the visit on its own merits. I have spoken! Have a great day!! (at Loch Ness) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCvkScaFFV4/?igshid=1gu6n0ukt8no5

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