Tulips in bloom in Denver’s Civic Center Park:
Nothing of profound significance here, I just liked the pattern these were planted in.
The Grumman F-14 Tomcat — a twin-engine, variable-sweep wing fighter in service with the U. S. Navy from 1974 – 2006.
Granted, this isn’t normally the kind of “Mayan” architecture I blog about, but in a distant sense, it’s related. Today I’m going to show you a bit of Denver history — the historic Mayan Theater, one of a few surviving examples of Mayan Revival style architecture.
One of the privileges of photographic life near Denver, Colorado is that you get some uniquely colorful holiday lights to play with. In particular, the Denver City and County building traditionally is bathed in a very… unrestrained choice of colored lights at night for the season. Call it gaudy, call it exuberant, call it tacky, the bottom line is that it’s a photographer magnet (we just can’t help ourselves).
Best of all, the folks running the building now turn off the street lights on Bannock Street in front of it every Sunday night when the building’s lit up — this makes it so much easier to capture the building in all its highly-saturated glory. So last Sunday, I got bundled up to handle our recent frigid night temperatures (clear sky, 17 degrees Fahrenheit) and went to town on the place.
The above photo was taken from near the end of the building’s south wing, if you were curious. This is definitely my favorite photo of the set, I really like how the snow in the foreground brings some of the chill to the viewer. Continue reading
Seen at the 2015 Denver Chalk Art Festival, it’s another impressive piece of work by Dawn Wagner:
A scene from this year’s “Christkindl Market” in downtown Denver, Colorado — shelves of beer steins on sale at a vendor’s stall:
Oddly enough, it was only on a recent trip that we discovered that while the word stein is German, this style of beer mugs is only called a stein in English-speaking countries. Stein is an abbreviation of the German steingut (stoneware), the material they’re made of. But in Germany, bierstein (“beer stone”) is the term used for a scaly deposit built up in poorly-cleaned brewing vessels. A mug like one of these would be called a krug, or more properly a bierkrug.
So there’s your language lesson for the day, more about the “Christkindl Market” in subsequent posts.
Another piece of art glass by Dale Chihuly (two pieces, actually), currently located in the Denver Botanic Gardens‘ Monet Pool:
This arrangement is one that absolutely looks better at night. In the daytime, you’re distracted by people and plants and benches behind the piece (from this vantage point). At night, the lighting on the glasswork helps isolate it from what would otherwise be clutter.
EXIF info:
Oly 12-40mm f/2.8 lens at 21mm and f/4.5 on E-M1 camera
1/25 sec at ISO 1600