Yet another day in Santa Cruz de la Palma on the island of La Palma part of the Canary Islands which are of course part of Spain, off the coast of Africa.

(Above) This guy was a blast to take picture of, speaks volumes about the place.

This is the hilly Santa Cruz de la Palma, perhaps not the typical volcano or ocean view, but this is life on the island for the inhabitants that see this kind of view every day.

Fun to see a street performer in a small city… usually it’s only in the big time cities in the busiest of locations.

I thought it was an awesome idea to put the restaurant menu on a chalk-like-board on the outside of the restaurant like this.

Certainly plenty of color and personality in this place.

More pictures here

The last post was some pictures while walking around mostly the inner portion of the small city.

This day I went down to the water front and did some sunrise pictures and then some more pictures downtown during the evening.

Since we already went over the city itself in the last post I’ll just talk about pictures more than the places.

(Above) A quaint road running along some ocean view property (Below) what they get to view

Nice little sunrise greated me as I went down to the nice bouldery beach… haha.
On a side note I did see a couple of sand beaches on the other side of the island… mostly black sand.

So while the island is beautiful it’s not your typical lay on the beach get-a-away vacation island.

Fun story about this kid… he was way into boxing, wanted some pictures, even took some of him actually boxing his friend. He was pretty proud of his accomplishments already early on in his career. I think this might have been during the actual match with his opponent just out of scene.

Yes it’s pretty colorful around here… but I think it’s almost a requirement for nice tropical ocean front to be colorful and inviting. It’s part of the allure.

Great mix of the city and the surroundings

Always great to see the natives doing their thing.

Regular street scenes are probably some of the best pictures to really get a feel for a location.

If only the car had parked a little bit forward… by like 3 ft… haha

But I love it still the same and am glad once again for Lightroom 3 and the noise reducation to work on pictures like this with the old D200 from 2006.

Envisioning Europe - May1
(By Scott Jarvie)

THE PROJECT

Today starts day 1 of an 82 day project. Each day we’ll post the pictures that were taken 4yrs previous.

This means 4yrs ago today these pictures were taken.
The hope is you’ll better be able to envision what these areas of Europe look like.
Join in on this trip and listen to some of the things written about the places, people and things.

The pictures were taken by Scott Jarvie – See his photoblog here
Tis I that will be writing this set of posts.

REMASTERED

The release is an exciting opportunity to go back through the pictures 4yrs later with lots more selecting and editing skills.
Going through the pictures with a faster computer and a better eye to bring back what I saw even with simple entry level lenses.

The purpose of these posts are to help you envision europe, and to enjoy beautiful pictures.
I’m not a photojournalist, I make no apologies for editing the pictures, I want them to insire an appreciation for the location to portray my vision for that area.

Thus these pictures are remastered. Which is probably the most exciting part of the project.

LAYOUT

Some posts will be long… because I took a lot of good pictures that day.
Some posts will be short… because I didn’t take a lot of pictures that day.

We show some of them BIG and other Small.
We’ll link you to the original gallery online as well.

I’ll aim for the following

• Favorites up front.
• Pictures by theme.
• Chronological order.

Don’t forget to view the full post to see ALL of the pictures

BEEN THERE?

Well then chime in and write a few words about the picture or your experiences.

Share it all

• Stories
• Links
• wikipedia info/links
• your own pictures

This is about learning about places and cultures get involved and share.
Perhaps we can even highlight your experience in some posts.
Envisioning… (By You)

STOP 1 – AIRPORT (Not Pictured)

I did take some pictures but I guess they didn’t make the Cut

STOP 2 – Blois, France (Pictured above)

Blois Wikipedia Entry -

Where is it? Google Maps

Seems every town in europe has some sort of storied past that would be intriguing to go into for each one.

We weren’t planning on stopping here, but we were driving down to Madrid from Paris and it was about lunch time so this is what was near.

Parking is always a chore, so we found a place and had to walk a ways to find something to eat, so why not do some more exploring on the way.

No we didn’t eat here but this is a pretty typical scene

There is so many more people on the streets than in most places in the United States (obvious exceptions to big cities like NYC)
My feeling is when a city designed hundreds and hundreds of years before the exsistence of the car makes it so parking is horrid, streets would get congested anyway.
It also makes so that most things are close by, people adapt to their evironment and then economies adapt to that as well.

People riding by.

Good ol’ window shopping and fun little book stores

Here’s a perfect little scene showing the goings on.

Funny that I end up showing off all the every day stuff… when all the tourists were over taking pictures of the more famous buildings and hanging out in the park.

I walked through the park… but I also took pictures of people doing random stuff.
I shot this one from the hip, all he would have seen was me carrying my camera loosly by my side.
Glad he took an interest in my nice camera and looked down at it.

Other random scenes of Blois.

STOP 3 – Side of the Road

Gold star if you know the name of this castle.

We were in a hurry to get down to Bordeaux to stay for the night. So we just stopped on the road (I think N 152)
It would have been just outside of Blois (or inside)

I would love to know the story about this little community. (Past, Present and Future)

I had an 18-200mm lens back in those days which made it handy to zoom in or out as much as I wanted.

STOP 4 – Bordeaux City Center

Wikipedia Entry on Bordeaux

Google maps – Bordeaux

There are a couple things I most remember about this place… the parrallel parking was killer that day… here I am first day in france. I’m using a car twice as big as most other cars and I not only have to fit in a tiny spot (the only we could find, just a few feet bigger than my car, but I had to do it fast because cars couldn’t just go around me, there was only one lane each way. Oh yeah and it was one of the busier roads in the city.

But here I am alive today, no car damage after 3 months of driving 12,000+ miles in 10+ countries

(Above) Oh the joys of Lightroom (Vers. 3) this was a nikon D200 and at night at ISO 1000 this thing is a grainy mess. But I just love the emotion so I had to save it! And it worked.

We got a tour by the family we were staying with. They took us to the cool bridge and I even had my tripod for some night shots.

STOP 5 – Dinner at our hosts

Thought a couple shots of a french kitchen might be interesting. I believe they caught these themselves that day or the day before.

FULL GALLERY (48 Images) – And in Chronological order