A small palace at a small Puuc route site in the Yucatán:
It’s a good thing Xlapak is free to visit (once you’ve made it to the site, naturally) — it’s tiny. And of course, it’s on the same road as all the bigger Puuc sites, so you might as well drop in if you’re in “the neighborhood.” No crowds here ever, guaranteed.
This is the best of three standing / restored structures at Xlapak, a modest but well-decorated little palace.
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is a fun place to skulk around in, should you ever be in town. Aside from all the great natural history material on display, the building itself has been added on to more times than I can count — leading to some interesting interior architecture.
I made this image in one of the building’s atriums (atria?), that once was a courtyard but since has been closed in and covered with a glass roof. Polished metallic wall tiles lead to interesting reflections and intersecting geometries.
I’ve really taken a liking lately to architectural abstracts — little interesting bits of texture and pattern that you’ll find while wandering through the built environment. Along those lines, I spotted this on a radiator at the Grant-Humphreys Mansion in Denver:
I made this image during this year’s Doors Open Denver event — a fantastic excuse for a little architectural exploration if you’re in Denver in April!
A scene in New Orleans’ French Quarter:
I took this out of a conference room window in a hotel I stayed at a few weeks back — and thought this was a fun composition, even though (maybe particularly because) it’s got a little secret.
That nice-looking wall in the background? It’s not a fancy hotel or luxurious home — it’s actually a well-disguised parking garage. Makes a nice background, though…
It’s tough coming up with a “different” way of photographing a landmark like the Golden Gate Bridge. Making life more challenging for me was the fact that on our recent trip to the bay area, it was overcast and wet most of the time.
But as luck would have it, we were headed north from San Francisco during one brief window of time in which we had actual blue skies and sunshine. I’d found some roads on the north end of the bridge via Google Earth, so wound up at an old artillery site called “Battery Spencer” in the Marin headlands. It was windy as can be, but I managed to hold my gear still for long enough to get off a few good shots like this one.
There are other spots further west along the road that will give you good views of the bridge, but Battery Spencer is the best one I could find to capture both the bridge and the city in one frame.
Structure III isn’t the largest building at Calakmul, and it was likely never the fanciest, but it’s by far the most interesting one there:
It was typical in the Maya Classic era to periodically rebuild structures — tearing down old superstructures, covering their platforms with another layer of masonry, building anew on top of them. In some cases, this happened every 20 or 50 years for centuries — that’s why a number of them took on elephantine proportions.
Structure III was different, though. It seems to have been inhabited for the duration of Calakmul’s existence (about 1,500 years), but was never buried and rebuilt. Fairly early in its history, a very well-appointed tomb was built into one of its rear rooms — other than that, it appears that nothing was done to alter its original architecture.
For 1,500 years.
The inhabitants did such a good job of maintenance that when Calakmul was rediscovered 1,000 years after it was abandoned, this was the only structure at the site that wasn’t just a rubble mound. It’s thought that the tomb held one of the original kings of the site, and that Structure III was a palace inhabited by his descendants.
Mosaic details in the Nunnery quadrangle at the ancient Maya ruins of Uxmal in Yucatán, Mexico:
Uxmal is justly known for its great mosaic stonework — amazing to think that this was all carved with stone tools (obsidian, to be specific).
At the (fairly small) Maya ruins of Dzibanché in Quintana Roo, Mexico:
This is a nicely restored little pyramid, and since the site of Dzibanché isn’t all that frequently visited, you can have it to yourself for a while. It’s a quick day-trip from either Costa Maya or Chetumal, too — an easy and affordable excursion should you find yourself in the area.
This is the north face of El Castillo (a.k.a., the Temple of Kukulkan) at the ruins of Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, Mexico:
It’s pretty much the image you see of this structure on postcards, calendars, T-shirts, and the like — and it’s harder to capture than you might think. Since it’s a “marquis” structure at one of the most visited of Maya ruins, everybody wants to get their picture taken in front of it. So if you want a “clean” photograph (i.e., no tourists) of the structure, you’ll have to do what I did — take a dozen or so photos of the thing, then use Photoshop Elements to combine them.
Looking north along the shoreline at the ancient Maya ruins of Tulúm in Quintana Roo, Mexico:
Tulúm may not have the best architecture compared to other Maya sites, but you’ve got to admit that its location can’t be beat for photography! And if you’re lucky enough to show up at low tide, the beach in this picture is open to swimmers and sunbathers.