Places

Spring fog

We had some lovely fog during this week. Dreamy but driveable, as I call it: enough visibility on the road to see where you were going, with enough atmosphere to make everything seem otherworldly. As I’m wont to do, I gallivanted through the local forests with my camera, enjoying myself. I couldn’t do it too much, because duty called. In my case, my current duty is to purchase materials and supervise the ongoing restoration work at our country estate: an old Saxon fortified church and parochial house in Magarei, built during medieval times, now in sore need of loving care. So as I was driving back and forth between Mediaș (known in Saxon as Mediasch) and Pelișor (known in Saxon as Magarei), I’d park the car on the side of the road and run off into the forest, camera in hand, clock ticking on my wrist, spend 10-20 minutes hopping over the molehills (there are quite a few of them this year, just about everywhere around Magarei), take my photos, take a few seconds to listen to the sounds of the forest, which are lovely this time of year, then I’d run back to the car to see to my work. Only a few birds have begun to sing among the trees, so what I mostly heard were the sounds of water droplets (fog condensate) falling onto last autumn’s foliage on the ground. It was a lovely sound, a muted sort of “mpphhh” that punctuated the fog-muffled silence of the forest, and since I love silence and hate man-made sounds, it was quite perfect.

Forest near Magarei, Transylvania, Romania
Forest near Magarei, Transylvania, Romania
In the countryside near Magarei, Transylvania, Romania
Forest near Magarei, Transylvania, Romania
Forest near Magarei, Transylvania, Romania
Forest near Magarei, Transylvania, Romania
Forest near Magarei, Transylvania, Romania

Places

A foggy autumn morning

One foggy autumn morning, I took some photographs… and here they are 😁. I love fog almost as much as I love thick snowfall, and for the same reasons: the air of mystery, the white shroud enveloping everything, the quiet, the timeless quality and mood… oh, I could go on and on… This particular morning, we were driving to Sibiu and we were atop the hills between Slimnic and Șeica Mare. I have to confess that I don’t typically plan these things out, but when I encounter them, I have a camera with me and I take advantage of the opportunity to capture those beautiful moments. We parked the car and I walked around those hills, taking in the atmosphere. I hope you’ll enjoy the photographs!

Somewhere between Slimnic and Agârbiciu, Transilvania, Romania

Shapes recovered from a thick fog using Lightroom’s Dehaze function. The photograph was mostly white beforehand. I love how the background looks, with those barely-visibile sihouettes. I know there’s a lot of noise but I love this image.

Near Slimnic, Transilvania, Romania

In the countryside between Slimnic and Agârbiciu, Transilvania, Romania

Ruși, Transilvania, Romania

Near Șeica Mare, Transilvania, Romania

I have a surprise for you. It’s going to be a surprise for me, too, because I’m going to try something new. I’m going to use this nifty payment button that WordPress has recently introduced, and I’m going to let you purchase all these images as a pack. There are 24 images here, which I’m going to deliver to you as a download at their original resolution once you purchase them. The terms outlined here will apply to how you use them. Here are a few ideas: make prints at a local lab, use the whole pack as a screensaver, use them as desktop backgrounds, use them in your artwork, use them on your website, etc. The price is $25. That’s a little more than $1 per image. If there’s demand, I may extend this same sort of deal to other photo galleries of mine published in the past or photos I publish in the future. A generous image pack, an affordable price for the whole thing, simple, easy, done.

Image Pack 20180608

You are purchasing the photographs from this post: a set of 24 images of a foggy autumn morning

$25.00

Places

An afternoon on the Transfagarasan Road

This weekend, we spent an afternoon on the Transfăgărășan Road, in the Făgăraș Mountains of Romania. (Trans-faragarasan → “Trans” = across and “Fagarasan” = the specific mountains which it crosses.) I enjoyed driving its challenging curves (Ligia not so much) and later we both enjoyed walking and meditating in the mountains. I also took photos (naturally) and I hope you’ll enjoy them.

This is how the mountains look as you approach them from E68, after you pass through a village called Cartisoara.

As we started to climb, these are the sorts of views we started to get. Hold on, the best stuff is yet to come.

At the top, it was fairly crowded. I tried to avoid the crowds as I took my photos. Some people were hiking, others were stuffing their faces. Not sure what it is about the top of a mountain that makes people so hungry. It’s not as if they climbed it — they drove it. There were loads of cars in the parking lot.

This is what the slopes to the top peaks looked like. Although it’s summer, we were fairly high up (above 2,000 meters in altitude) so the weather was foggy and fairly cold (10-15 degrees Celsius).

Since it was too crowded and noisy at the top, and the smell of cooking pervaded the air, Ligia and I decided to drive on past the main peaks and we stopped further down the road, where it was nice and quiet. That’s Ligia hiking toward me.

The views only got better as we went higher up. The black dot in the center of the photo is Ligia.

I’ll let this three-photo panorama show you what I mean. I left the white space unmasked on purpose, to show you everything the camera captured.

Here’s a close-up of the left side of that pano, showing the twists and turns of this picturesque mountain road.

We stopped to meditate and enjoy the tremendous beauty before us where the rock face turned sharply upward and climbing by foot became dangerous (we had no climbing gear with us). As we sat there, fog from the valley rose up alongside the cliff, joining with the clouds.

We climbed down refreshed and clear-headed, and as evening drew near, we wound our way down toward Sibiu and home, but not before taking another panorama of the Transfagarasan.

Here’s another photograph that shows the spread of the road in the valley below.

As usual, if you’ll go through gallery below, you’ll find photos that I haven’t shown here. Enjoy!

Places

Morning fog, Virginia countryside

In my book, there are only a handful of things that rank as high as taking a walk in nature, in the midst of soft, lightly glowing morning fog. This was one of those beautiful mornings I won’t soon forget.