Oh, you catch me at breakfast…Snow in Greece?Butterflies on the Buddleia.California here I come…Awwwww.Cyprus, another European country not too wee, poor or stupid to be independent.I know, I know, we’re always having it, but it is fantastic.White sealSt Kilda.White weaselTarsigerUnst Lighthouse.Yosemite National ParkWhite Tailed Eagle (Finland)Venice.Erm, no, you’re not.Is this for eating?Dodgy having a hug with tusks like this… You could have my eye out…Chinese road system… Tianmen Mountain.If I keep my head down, do you think they won’t see me?
Beautiful pictures, I am completely astonished at the composition in the Greece picture. But I am a completely taken with Yosemite National Park. Hard to credit it is probably a super-volcano. I think it was a guy called Ansel Adams that made me think it was the most astonishing place on Earth. That photo is up there with his work.
Yosemite Valley, which is part of Yosemite National Park, is a magical place. Unlike some of the scenic areas in the far reaches of the wilderness West, it is relatively accessible from a major population center. It’s on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Range, just a three or four hour drive east from San Francisco.
Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, and first visited Yosemite in 1916 where he took his first pictures with a simple Kodak box camera. He became a world famous photographer, and throughout his life returned to Yosemite again and again for renewed inspiration. His photographic medium was large-format black and white. He often used an 8×10 view camera, and never published a color picture. His breathtaking monochrome views of Yosemite and the wild places of the American continent have never been equaled in artistic excellence.
About the last eight minutes of this fine documentary on Adams are emotional and evocative…….describing his artistic documentation of the wild American West. He had been born just 12 years after the US Census Bureau in 1890 declared that the US frontier had ceased to exist and that the American continent had been settled from Ocean to Ocean.
Quote about Ansel Adams:
“Adams’ pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition. It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust, and belief, that Adams has brought to it.”
“If this is the case, his pictures are all the more precious, for they stand as the last records for the young……and for the future…..of what they missed; and for the aging……for a little while……they will be a souvenir of what was lost.”
Tris…..It appears to be taken from almost the same spot as the Soppy Sunday Yosemite picture. That’s “Half Dome,” with the Merced River in the foreground.
There must be millions of photos of Eilean Donan Castle, but how many folk know it’s a recent build. About the only 13th century part of it is the foundations.
It is a bonny castle though.
Readers breathlessly tracking the previously reported WordPress malfunction on my Firefox and Chrome browsers will wish to know the latest data. Previous behavior is confirmed. As soon as Soppy Sunday went up, will all the new pictures clearly visible on all browsers, the pictures on the previous posting disappeared from Firefox and Chrome (but not from Internet Explorer,) leaving only the file names and the captions. All pictures on all previous postings remain invisible on Firefox and Chrome as before.
But at least the pictures on the current posting remain visible in all browsers, and the older ones can still be seen in Internet Explorer.
It has been suggested that Trump may be responsible. 😉
YW douglas……..It’s sometimes thought surprising that a twentieth century photographer never worked in color, at least later in his career. But when you compare the beautiful color picture of Half Dome with the Merced River in front at Yosemite posted on Soppy Sunday, with the Adams photograph posted above, taken at the same spot in winter, the color can almost seem a distraction.
Adams worked in large format photography that produced large negatives suitable for photo murals. He received a commission to produce photo murals of the National Parks for the new Department of the Interior Building being built in Washington in 1936 by the FDR administration. The work was interrupted by WWII, but this NPR (National Public Radio) piece reports that his negatives now at the National Archives have been resurrected and printed to produce the murals now displayed there.
If Yosemite is the most beautiful landscape in America, I think that the East front of the Teton Range in Wyoming is a close second. Adams photographed Grand Teton National Park for the Interior Department murals. In 1947, he also made an iconic photograph of Mount McKinley (now renamed Denali,) the highest peak in North America.
Teton Range – East Front and Snake River – Wyoming
Wonder Lake and Mount McKinley (Denali) Alaska – 1947
Danny, You’ve added to the pleasure of seeing Tris’s Soppy Sunday with the pictures by Ansel Adams. I was fortunate enough to get to the big retrospective at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich 5 years ago. What an amazing experience to see so many photographic masterpieces, beautifully printed and displayed. Adams was a true master. He said, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” He also said, and it’s particularly relevant now, “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
Thanks Andi. Adams in his later years especially was very important to the environmental movement.
How fortunate that you had the opportunity to see that big retrospective. He considered the negative to be the musical composition, while the print was the concert hall performance. He was by all accounts a master in the darkroom, laboring intensively for the perfect print…..dodging and burning in……..the techniques of the old school. His most famous picture is “Moonrise – Hernandez, New Mexico” which looks very different in the negative than in Adams’ great prints.
Thanks, Danny – that is indeed a beautiful picture. Ansel Adams is of course most famous, justifiably, for his landscape work. Less well known but arguably as important was the work he did recording the Japanese- American Internment Camp at Manzanar. You may well be familiar with it but for anyone who is interested a significant collection is held by the Library of Congress. This link will act as an introduction:- http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/manz/highlights.html
beautiful pictures and much needed by me if no-one else. Loved mum and baby cat, the elephants – always a fan. The seal was lovely and picture of a weasel – well it was a stoat -er!
Is that a bendy banana my favourite cousin was eating? And yes little one we can see you and mum would prefer you didn’t pull her hair 🙂
Don’t you love the infinite patience of mum’s across the animal kingdom, when it comes to their little ones? But please, no one ever give them mobile phones.
The bike rider is so perfectly California…….in the Summer and Fall dry season when the shallow rooted grasses die out and turn brown…….with only the trees to provide greenery for the landscape. I noted the dry season landscape on my first visit, and was told that it’s called the “golden hills of California.”
As for Greece, do they EVER run out of white paint?
I guess that actually IS snow, since upon closer inspection the trees are white. And I doubt that even the Greeks have started painting the trees white. 😉
My first thought was that the Greeks had just gone crazy with the white paint.
Interesting how snow becomes big news when it falls in unusual places. Snow in southern California is always news, as is snow in Florida (happens occasionally in the northern panhandle.) I think that Las Vegas got a little snow some years ago, which was worth a national news item.
And where do you think this is?
HAWAII! (The big observatories identify the location as Mauna Kea.)
Snow is pretty common in winter in Hawaii above 9,000 ft on the volcanic peaks. There’s even some informal ski runs on the slopes of the tall volcanoes.
LOL…..not what you think of for Hawaii. The astronomers and others who work up above 13,000 ft on Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa on the Big Island are surely prepared for cold weather and occasional snow. The people who handle the tourist trade down at Honolulul on Oahu undoubtedly dress differently. 🙂
The islands do have a range of altitudes of course. Not sure what temps the tourists encounter when they fly over to the Big Island and visit Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. There are altitudes between 5,000 and 10.000 ft among the islands I think.
Tris, could that White Weasel be a stoat? Or, as we are wont to call them when their white winter coats with dark-tipped tail form the furry parts of noble and royal robes – ermine. Anyway, stoater o’ a pictyer!
Lovely collection once again, thanks for the seal. Also as usual, interesting comments from the other republicans. I found the tarsiger picture quite delightful, so much so that I’ve spent a while on the TarsigerTeam twitter feed looking at loads of pictures of birds which are NOT tarsigers, including the pale legged leaf warbler which has just been added to the British list (of wild bird records in GB). It’s fascinating what you learn from Soppy Sunday (or in my case Soggy Monday, as I’m often a day late reading, and it is as usual raining 🙂 )
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Beautiful pictures, I am completely astonished at the composition in the Greece picture. But I am a completely taken with Yosemite National Park. Hard to credit it is probably a super-volcano. I think it was a guy called Ansel Adams that made me think it was the most astonishing place on Earth. That photo is up there with his work.
And that is high praise.
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Glad you liked it, Douglas.
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Yosemite Valley, which is part of Yosemite National Park, is a magical place. Unlike some of the scenic areas in the far reaches of the wilderness West, it is relatively accessible from a major population center. It’s on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Range, just a three or four hour drive east from San Francisco.
Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, and first visited Yosemite in 1916 where he took his first pictures with a simple Kodak box camera. He became a world famous photographer, and throughout his life returned to Yosemite again and again for renewed inspiration. His photographic medium was large-format black and white. He often used an 8×10 view camera, and never published a color picture. His breathtaking monochrome views of Yosemite and the wild places of the American continent have never been equaled in artistic excellence.
About the last eight minutes of this fine documentary on Adams are emotional and evocative…….describing his artistic documentation of the wild American West. He had been born just 12 years after the US Census Bureau in 1890 declared that the US frontier had ceased to exist and that the American continent had been settled from Ocean to Ocean.
Quote about Ansel Adams:
“Adams’ pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition. It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust, and belief, that Adams has brought to it.”
“If this is the case, his pictures are all the more precious, for they stand as the last records for the young……and for the future…..of what they missed; and for the aging……for a little while……they will be a souvenir of what was lost.”
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Yosemite Valley – Ansel Adams
Half Dome – Yosemite Valley in Winter – Ansel Adams
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They are fabulous, especially that last one.
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Tris…..It appears to be taken from almost the same spot as the Soppy Sunday Yosemite picture. That’s “Half Dome,” with the Merced River in the foreground.
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Fabulous, Danny
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There must be millions of photos of Eilean Donan Castle, but how many folk know it’s a recent build. About the only 13th century part of it is the foundations.
It is a bonny castle though.
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True, I love it though. I’m hoping Munguin will buy it for us to retire to in the fullness of time.
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He can’t allow YOU to retire, YOU have to show us his friends and places he has visited.
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LOL. Oh damn. I hadn’t thought of that.
Ah well, onward and erm ….
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Ruins of Eilean Donan Castle from sometime before 1911. (From Wiki.) Twentieth century reconstruction began after 1911.
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Munguin might have bought that for my retirement, Danny.
But the restoration work will have put the price up.
I might get a tent?
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Tris…..Yep! The original in 1911 would certainly have been more in MY price range. 😉
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Readers breathlessly tracking the previously reported WordPress malfunction on my Firefox and Chrome browsers will wish to know the latest data. Previous behavior is confirmed. As soon as Soppy Sunday went up, will all the new pictures clearly visible on all browsers, the pictures on the previous posting disappeared from Firefox and Chrome (but not from Internet Explorer,) leaving only the file names and the captions. All pictures on all previous postings remain invisible on Firefox and Chrome as before.
But at least the pictures on the current posting remain visible in all browsers, and the older ones can still be seen in Internet Explorer.
It has been suggested that Trump may be responsible. 😉
LikeLiked by 2 people
Inexplicable. Well to me at least, but then, in fairness, I don;t have the best scientific mind.
Trump probably thinks Munguin’s Republic is FAKE NEWS …BAD.
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Yes, That sounds like Trump. Maybe even a Trump North Korean computer cyber attack that went awry……SAD.
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LOL.
It’s like Donald hasn’t caught up with the emoji
😦
SAD
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Danny,
Thanks for the info about Ansel Adams. Truly magnificent photographer.
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YW douglas……..It’s sometimes thought surprising that a twentieth century photographer never worked in color, at least later in his career. But when you compare the beautiful color picture of Half Dome with the Merced River in front at Yosemite posted on Soppy Sunday, with the Adams photograph posted above, taken at the same spot in winter, the color can almost seem a distraction.
Adams worked in large format photography that produced large negatives suitable for photo murals. He received a commission to produce photo murals of the National Parks for the new Department of the Interior Building being built in Washington in 1936 by the FDR administration. The work was interrupted by WWII, but this NPR (National Public Radio) piece reports that his negatives now at the National Archives have been resurrected and printed to produce the murals now displayed there.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125228486
If Yosemite is the most beautiful landscape in America, I think that the East front of the Teton Range in Wyoming is a close second. Adams photographed Grand Teton National Park for the Interior Department murals. In 1947, he also made an iconic photograph of Mount McKinley (now renamed Denali,) the highest peak in North America.
Teton Range – East Front and Snake River – Wyoming
Wonder Lake and Mount McKinley (Denali) Alaska – 1947
LikeLiked by 2 people
Danny, You’ve added to the pleasure of seeing Tris’s Soppy Sunday with the pictures by Ansel Adams. I was fortunate enough to get to the big retrospective at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich 5 years ago. What an amazing experience to see so many photographic masterpieces, beautifully printed and displayed. Adams was a true master. He said, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” He also said, and it’s particularly relevant now, “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Andi. Adams in his later years especially was very important to the environmental movement.
How fortunate that you had the opportunity to see that big retrospective. He considered the negative to be the musical composition, while the print was the concert hall performance. He was by all accounts a master in the darkroom, laboring intensively for the perfect print…..dodging and burning in……..the techniques of the old school. His most famous picture is “Moonrise – Hernandez, New Mexico” which looks very different in the negative than in Adams’ great prints.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks, Danny – that is indeed a beautiful picture. Ansel Adams is of course most famous, justifiably, for his landscape work. Less well known but arguably as important was the work he did recording the Japanese- American Internment Camp at Manzanar. You may well be familiar with it but for anyone who is interested a significant collection is held by the Library of Congress. This link will act as an introduction:-
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/manz/highlights.html
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Andi…..I wasn’t aware of the Manzanar pictures. Very interesting! Ansel could indeed take fine pictures of people. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
beautiful pictures and much needed by me if no-one else. Loved mum and baby cat, the elephants – always a fan. The seal was lovely and picture of a weasel – well it was a stoat -er!
Is that a bendy banana my favourite cousin was eating? And yes little one we can see you and mum would prefer you didn’t pull her hair 🙂
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unless you are Danny in which case we might not actually see you.
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Shhhh, don’t say anything, but I think Munguin is considering giving Danny a 5% discount on next year’s subscription.
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The least Mr. Munguin can do. 😉
I’m quite put out having to open Internet Explorer to see the previous pictures……LOL.
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You can guarantee that, when it comes to parting with money, it will be the VERY least that he will do! Ask Panda Paws.
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Boom boom…
Glad you liked them.
Don’t you love the infinite patience of mum’s across the animal kingdom, when it comes to their little ones? But please, no one ever give them mobile phones.
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The bike rider is so perfectly California…….in the Summer and Fall dry season when the shallow rooted grasses die out and turn brown…….with only the trees to provide greenery for the landscape. I noted the dry season landscape on my first visit, and was told that it’s called the “golden hills of California.”
As for Greece, do they EVER run out of white paint?
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Well, I’ve been to Greece and I think I can say: Nope, never.
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I guess that actually IS snow, since upon closer inspection the trees are white. And I doubt that even the Greeks have started painting the trees white. 😉
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It is snow.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/752341/Snow-in-Europe-pictures-latest-photographs-images-snowfall-Greece-Italy-Turkey
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My first thought was that the Greeks had just gone crazy with the white paint.
Interesting how snow becomes big news when it falls in unusual places. Snow in southern California is always news, as is snow in Florida (happens occasionally in the northern panhandle.) I think that Las Vegas got a little snow some years ago, which was worth a national news item.
And where do you think this is?
HAWAII! (The big observatories identify the location as Mauna Kea.)
Snow is pretty common in winter in Hawaii above 9,000 ft on the volcanic peaks. There’s even some informal ski runs on the slopes of the tall volcanoes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow… I wonder if the locals have the clothes for this kind of event.
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LOL…..not what you think of for Hawaii. The astronomers and others who work up above 13,000 ft on Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa on the Big Island are surely prepared for cold weather and occasional snow. The people who handle the tourist trade down at Honolulul on Oahu undoubtedly dress differently. 🙂
The islands do have a range of altitudes of course. Not sure what temps the tourists encounter when they fly over to the Big Island and visit Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. There are altitudes between 5,000 and 10.000 ft among the islands I think.
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Yeah, if course. Silly, I was thinking about the beaches…
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Tris, could that White Weasel be a stoat? Or, as we are wont to call them when their white winter coats with dark-tipped tail form the furry parts of noble and royal robes – ermine. Anyway, stoater o’ a pictyer!
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Yeah, could well be that, andi.
Looks much nicer in the real world than it does in the fairy tale that is the British upper classes.
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Great photos. I understand they have snow in Greece as often as we get sun in the Western Isles!
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Maybe a little more often than that!!!
Good hols?
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Lovely collection once again, thanks for the seal. Also as usual, interesting comments from the other republicans. I found the tarsiger picture quite delightful, so much so that I’ve spent a while on the TarsigerTeam twitter feed looking at loads of pictures of birds which are NOT tarsigers, including the pale legged leaf warbler which has just been added to the British list (of wild bird records in GB). It’s fascinating what you learn from Soppy Sunday (or in my case Soggy Monday, as I’m often a day late reading, and it is as usual raining 🙂 )
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I’m always amazed at the shedloads of information our seriously intelligent readers have on such a wide range of subjects.
I often wonder what such intelligent people are doing here though… 🙂
Raining here too!!! Again!
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