Matrei im Osttirol

During our recent visit to Austria, we spent a week in the village of Matrei im Osttirol (i.o.) [map] [reference], which is about 25km away from Lienz, and sits in a valley nestled between the Alps of that region. One of the mountains there is Goldried Mountain, and that’s where we stayed, at Hotel Goldried. [...]

Just give me a good zoom lens, thanks

Greetings from Osttirol! My wife and I have been vacationing in Austria for the past week. It’s a gorgeous place to visit and, needless to say, I took tons of photos here. I’ve been carrying my Canon 5D and my lenses with me everywhere, and let me tell you, I’ve been sorely in need of [...]

Memories of fairy tales haunt me to this day

Memories of fairy tales haunt me to this day, originally uploaded by raoulpop.
Took this in Moldova, Romania, last September. Would love to revisit that place and a few others I saw. You rarely see such beauty these days.
Another place I’d love to visit in Romania is Muntii Apuseni. Never got the chance to see them [...]

Shenandoah Valley panoramas

You are about to see several panoramic photos that have taken me well over 35 hours to create — and I’m not counting travel time, setup time, time it took to take the photos, and the time it took to write this post.
A couple of weekends ago, Ligia and I got into our MINI and [...]

Dawn over the Atlantic Ocean

This will be my 1,000th post, so perhaps it’s fitting that it be this: photos of the dawn, breaking high above the clouds, somewhere near the coast of France. It symbolizes a new beginning, a milestone — although I have to confess it came by surprise. I hadn’t monitored the number of posts for a [...]

Passing through Cheile Bicazului (part 2)

I realized something after I read through yesterday’s post on Cheile Bicazului a couple of times. I hadn’t included any photos of the actual mountain pass, which made my comments about how it was carved out of the rock seem a bit superfluous. That was an oversight that needed to be corrected.
This time, you’ll get [...]

Passing through Cheile Bicazului

This is Part 1 of a two-part post on Cheile Bicazului. You can read Part Two here.
During our recent trip to Romania, we passed through Cheile Bicazului, a stunning, narrow pass carved through the Carpathian mountains. We started out on the Transylvania side, where the weather was beautiful and sunny, though we could see [...]

Right here with you

I took this photo during our recent camping trip to the Blue Ridge mountains, somewhere near Natural Bridge, VA. Although the sky was overcast during our first night, it cleared up afterwards, and we couldn’t believe how many stars were visible during our second night. It was so beautiful and peaceful, that I couldn’t help [...]

Busy, busy, busy

It’s a bit unusual for me that I can’t find the time to write posts, but that’s just what’s happening. I left home shortly after noon on Friday with Ligia to go camping with close friends of ours in the Blue Ridge mountains. Had loads of fun, and we visited Natural Bridge. I’m afraid I [...]

Interesting animals

The olm is a cave salamander completely adapted to the dark environment where it lives. It has no eyes, and is completely without pigmentation. Early discoverers thought olms were baby dragons. These salamanders live in a group of caves in the Balkan mountains.

Do you know what animal has the strongest punch in the world? Look [...]

A hike to Cheile Turului

Cheile Turului is a picturesque and little known canyon located near Cluj, Romania. It’s a bit hard to get to. It’s off the main roads, and one has to travel on unpaved country roads and through a couple of villages to get to it, but the effort is worth it.
I’m not sure how to best [...]

Passing through the Carpathian mountains

I dug up some old photos of mine from November of 2002, taken from the train as it passed through the Carpathian mountains in Romania. They’re posted below. I apologize for their graininess, but I took them with an old APS camera and scanned them years after they were developed. But they get the point [...]