York Minster Looking Up

Like virtually all cathedrals, York Minster is in the heart of the city. Rising majestically above the crowds and surrounding buildings, they are wonderfully photogenic - until you actually try to take a picture. That's when you find you would need to be at the top of a very tall building in the vicinity to even begin to capture all of the building, and that doesn't even address the distortion. So you make the obligatory effort and then crop out the crowds at ground level and you can at least show what the building looks like...sort of.

Then you concentrate of the small bits, an effort that is truly never-ending.

 

 

As you lean farther and farther back, trying to catch the lovely bits at the very top, you are in danger of falling over backwards.

Flickr Mosaics - Winchester

I do love making photo mosaics on Flickr, I do mine on bighugelabs.com  Here are several I recently made from photos of my visit to Winchester, Hampshire in 2007.  We spent a week in Winchester, a really lovely small city with loads of history, architectural gems, lush gardens, and a cathedral.  It was June and everything was in bloom.



High Street, the photo in the center, is so beautifully preserved that you can't tell if it's 2007 or 1907 if it wasn't for the omnipresent trashcans...Winchester is very big on trashcans,



Even in a week there was not enough time to begin to capture all the lovely details.



These photos are from Queen Eleanor's Garden at the castle (home of King Arthur's supposed Round Table).  It was just coming into bloom, but was so lush and green and amazingly full of ideas for such a small garden.



All cathedrals are wonderful in their own way, but Winchester Cathedral has to be one of my favorites.

Bollards in the heart of the town were painted in the style of famous artists, it felt like a treasure hunt as wandered around town and stumbled on on of them.  It also felt like a pop quiz as the three of us sometimes struggled to identify the artist.

Looking back at these mosaics, several things come to mind that aren't represented here, but deserve to be mentioned in any conversation about Winchester.  I'll save them for a later post...maybe even tomorrow.

Salisbury, Wiltshire

The notes on my Flickr collection entitled 'England' say "I just save my money until I can go to England again...and then I take a couple thousand photos...and then I play with them until I can go back to England and take some more".

I have been playing with my photos of Salisbury - one of my favorite citys.  These are from my 2009 visit.

All of these spots are in the heart of Salisbury.

As you can see, it was spring.



A really lovely cathedral, where the few modern changes have been chosen with great care.


The specifics on any of these photos are on the Flickr site - link to left and also to right.