Travel Photography
Just loved the colors and textures on it! You can see some of the bubbles forming in the turquoise water that will lead to an eruption. Stokkur goes off about every five minutes. We were there right before sunset and the light was amazing. The hotsprings create a great deal of mist and the clouds looked like dripping watercolor paintings. Amazing place. Geysir National ParkIceland’s most famous geysers, Stokkur and Geysir, are in Geysir National Park. Geysir National ParkIceland’s […]
The Republic of San Marino is a lovely little microstate near Rimini, Italy. Feeling the need to get away from another endless Moscow winter, my husband and I ran off to Italy for 3 days on a “Hot Tour!” that included airfare and a hotel for a ridiculously low price. We spent the first day exploring Rimini, the second in Urbino, and on the third took a bus over to the old city part of San Marino. It’s a beautiful fortified […]
Basically just messing around with some travel pictures from the summer school I worked at in Turkey – we did an excursion to this wonderful marble canyon. The walls were as sensuously curved as Classical sculpture, but there was a wildness too… Well, I was there at midday and the light was only so-so, and I was just scanning through my Lightroom presets and thought some X= presets (I have one called X=Polaroid+Blue but can’t find it on their site now; […]
Stony shores of Långvik bay near Helsinki[/caption]Just returned from a ten day trip to Finland with the family of one of my English students. We spent a good bit of time fishing off this island, catching one pike there. About where these wonderful rocks began, I handed off my pole and picked up my camera – hadn’t caught anything but weeds (lots and lots of them) anyway. I’ve recently been going through some tutorials on image enhancement, and one thing […]
I just spent another three weeks in Tallinn, Estonia, and after seeing how grungy the city was in March snowmelt (Tallinn is utterly lovely, but the end of winter always looks like nature has a hangover) I decided that moody, blurry black and whites might be a good thing. I saw some gorgeous photos of that sort on Flickr taken using a specialized lens called a “Lensbaby” (manufacturer’s site here if you’re interested), and found a local store selling […]
Last month I did a shoot in Ankara with model Özge Can posing in a chiton, a dress common to women throughout the ancient Mediterranean, at the Roman Baths archaeological site. Özge is working on a master’s degree in environmental engineering and does modeling as a hobby, and we connected via Model Mayhem. I’ve been thinking about writing more about where the ideas for these shoots come from, so here goes: At the beginning of the2008 Summer Olympics, Greece hired […]
One of the world’s best collections of ancient Roman sculpture is in the relatively small Antalya Archaeological Museum, on Turkey’s Southern coast. An ancient settlement itself, Antalya is within 90 minute’s drive of five ruined ancient cities, and the pick of the finds from them reside in the city’s museum.
Amissos – Samsun, Turkey – Images by Kira Hagen The English Club visited Amissos on a cool November afternoon. The the wintry sunlight was fading fast, and slid golden over the twin tumuli atop the hill above the old harbor, slowly fading to twilight blues as it sank behind the coastal mountains. The air was cool, a faint breeze blowing in from the sea. Situated to give panoramic views of the Westwards from Samsun, the city seemed, for once, tranquil […]
Long time since I posted anything on here. A wordpress upgrade broke the old “Options” theme I was using, and I’ve been fiddling with making the blog presentable again since then, on and off. Mosty off as I was spending a lot of time job seeking, then getting ready to move, and finally moving from Minneapolis to Samsun. Samsun is a small city on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey – friendly, middle class, full of observant Muslims, and a […]
I love watching art restoration work in progress, especially when the technicians are actively working on things. These statues were in a wing of the Louvre that was undergoing repairs and covered in a great deal of dust. The plastic draped over them made me think of bridal veils.