As spring comes to Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Lives and Times: Writing on the World Around Us, visits the historic gardens to experiment with a Canon EF-M 28m Macro lens.
Continue reading “Macro Flora at the The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney”
Unsure on the oceans, unrivalled on land, humankind is by nature a terra-centric species. For primates, the seas are more than a physical boundary, but a psychological finisterre, an end of the earth. Blue is a film that sends us back into the sea from which we came, a film that creates an oceanic consciousness unbounded by illusions of species primacy. Continue reading “‘Blue’: Sending Us Back to the Sea”
Under the waters, in the skies, how many shades of blue can be seen in the Ría de Aldán? On the ridges and in the shallows, how many greens? Continue reading “Light and Life on the Ría de Aldán”
From the sea the old man comes. I didn’t see him enter, only exit, as if he had never been on land. He is brown and round, his belly protrudes over skinny legs, and his back is bent. He is nude, and moves slow. Continue reading “The Seduction of the Sea”
The Romantics said that experience is heightened, deepened, by the sublime – the feeling of marvel mixed with fear at the sight of raw natural beauty: a mountain’s peak, an ocean’s depths, the desert’s breadth… On the Cíes there is this sublimity… Continue reading “Atlantic Island Explorations IV: A Return to the Real on the Illas Cíes”
Lashed by winds, cursed with salt, pummelled by wave and current, the Alentejo and Vincentine Coast is the archetype of an Atlantic environment. Marking continental Europe’s western-most extreme, this natural park in Portugal’s Algarve offers the traveller one hundred and twenty kilometres of immense beaches backed by towering dune systems, of lonely headlands receiving the brunt of the ocean’s energy Continue reading “Atlantic Explorations III: The Elements of the Algarve (Photographic Essay)”
At the northern extreme of the Playa As Dornas there stands a lone bagpiper. He looks out to the sea and plays a lively tune, his fingers creeping over the pipe and his arms pressing on the bladder. The wind occasionally carries his notes out of earshot, and the sound of the waves constantly crashes over his melody. He is one of the few inhabitants of this Atlantic island, the Illa de Ons. Continue reading “Atlantic Island Explorations II: The Ons Oasis”
Wanting to learn from those who have spent their life observing the wonders of the world around us, Lives and Times spoke to César Lema Costas, a man who has spent much of his fifty two years on Earth learning from the marvels of the natural world. Continue reading “A Conversation with César Lema: On a Rural Return”
Brilliant black, shiny like a crows feathers, a black deep as azabache, the Millo Corvo lies locked away in a stone grain store, an horreo, drying through the wet Atlantic winter. This black corn is an ancient strain of maize, brought to Galicia countless centuries ago from the New World, and lost not so long ago to the Old World, disappearing against the march of sterilised and genetically modified strains of corn. Continue reading “The Resurrection of the Cob: The Millo Corvo (The Black Corn)”
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