At the ruins of Tulúm in Quintana Roo, Mexico:
You can’t actually walk on this beach (it’s reserved for nesting sea turtles), but a trail through the site runs right past it — and it makes a great foreground for shots like this! The only real problem is that trash tends to wash up after storms, so you need to clone it out of your shot (since, obviously, you can’t walk out and get it off the beach).
In the Maya ruins of Sayil, Mexico (along the “Puuc Route“):
If you’re looking for Puuc-style architecture, most of its sub-styles can be seen somewhere in this structure — its three levels were built in a mix of Puuc styles over hundreds of years. In the interest of preservation, you can’t go up the front steps any more, but with a decent long lens, you can get good views / shots of all sorts of architectural details even from down on the ground.
You’ll need either a wide lens, or some stitching software to get the whole thing in one image, though. I shot this with a 7 mm lens on my Olympus E-5 — so, equivalent FOV to a 14 mm full-frame setup.
Stucco decorations on the face of the Acropolis at the Maya ruins of Ek’ Balam:
This stucco is in fantastic shape for its age — in no small part thanks to the fact that it was buried inside the Acropolis pyramid not long after it was built. It’s a tricky photographic subject thanks to the protective thatched roof overhead (the light’s even, but low, all day long), but it’s worth it to preserve this amazing work.
Xlapak has just three standing structures — this is the north face of the best of them:
Xlapak is a tiny little Maya site along the “Puuc Route” in Yucatán, Mexico. It’s so small that it may well have been a “suburb” of one of its Puuc neighbors. Still, admission is free, and you can see what there is to see of these ruins in well under an hour — so if you’re ever in “the neighborhood,” it’s worth stopping to check it out.
From the ancient Maya ruins of Chicanná, here’s the House of the Serpent Mouth (a.k.a. Structure II):
As you can see with a bit of squinting, this structure gets its nickname from the fact that the front of the building is modeled after a monster mouth (teeth both above and in front of the door, stylized eyes, etc.).
The site was discovered and named (Chicanná means “serpent-mouth house” in Mayan) by Jack D. Eaton in 1966. So… this structure was named after its Chenes-style monster mouth doorway, and the site was named after the structure. It’s a great little site to explore — not very big, but also not crowded.
This is the northwest corner of El Castillo in Chichén Itzá, Mexico:
El Castillo is a bit of a funny thing — half of it has been restored to nearly what it once looked like (or at least, so it’s thought locally — although some writers are skeptical about the accuracy of its current form). Meanwhile, the other two faces have just been consolidated. So if you want a pretty picture of the structure, the north and west sides are the ones to use.
By the way, I’ve got a bunch of Maya shots languishing over in my Flickr stream — so to get them a bit more visibility, I’ll be getting them in blog posts here over the next week or two. Prepare for an onslaught of ruin(s)!
A little bit of autumn color to brighten up a wintery day:
This was on opportunistic shot I took on a lunchtime photowalk some months back.
Another fun shot from the 2012 National Western Stock Show — this one from the Cowboy Mounted Shooting event:
Honestly, I’d never even *heard* of Cowboy Mounted Shooting as a competitive event before. But when we showed up at the stock show ticket desk, we could definitely hear it! We wandered into the arena to see what all the noise was from — and found this fun little event going on.
Getting this shot was a bit tricky, though. The arena lights are relatively dim, and the horses move pretty quickly — so I had to let the ISO get up to 2500 in order to get a reasonably fast shutter speed. At times like this, it helps to catch the action when the horse and rider are rounding a corner — so they’re moving as slowly as they’ll ever be. Oh, and put your camera on “continuous” shooting — catching sparks in mid-air is a game of chance…
Seen at the 2012 National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:
An oldie but goodie from Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington:
Hope everybody had a fun and festive holiday break! It’s almost hard for me to believe now that I took this with my first DSLR nearly four years ago…