Mértola | Alentejo

Mértola was one of the first places I visited in Portugal, back in 2007 while here on holiday for the first time. I remember being fascinated by the tiny white houses and mismatched roof tiles, so very different to what I was used to back home… but the thing that made the biggest impression, that took my breath away quite literally, was the heat. So much heat. No wind, no shade, just hot white light reflecting everywhere and a cloudless blue sky burning down from above. So keeping that in mind, try not to visit in the peak of summer… not…

Personal project – Lena on the beach

I have been playing around with blur and movement in images for a while but never really got around to experimenting with it properly until a few months ago, when a friend came to visit and I dragged her to the beach in the bottom half of her wedding dress…

Alentejo

As you may have noticed by now, I am quite a big fan of the Alentejo region of Portugal. South of the Tagus river (Tejo) but before you get to the southern most coast, this part of the country is typified by olive trees and cork oaks, vineyards and tiny sunbleached villages. I love it here and visit as often as possible (except for during the peak of the summer, when the heat is unbearable). These are a few iPhone photos from the last year or so of visits…  Barragem da Alqueva Évora  Alcaçovas Casa Branca

Évora, Alentejo

The first time I visited Évora was back in 2007 and I fell in love with the city immediately… so much so that we were even talking about maybe living there once we decided to settle in Portugal. But then the second time I visited was in the peak of the summer, and I quickly changed my mind. The city is incredibly beautiful, yes… but 40 degree heat and absolutely no cooling breeze for 2 months of the year… not to mention the fact that it´s a bit far from the coast, is all too much for this wind and ocean loving…

travel photography portugal

Autumn Road-trip – Serra da Estrela

After we left the Monsanto region we travelled further north to the Serra da Estrela. We´d been sort-of hoping to catch a bit of snow but since it hadn´t yet started we weren´t really expecting it… and as it turns out, the first snows fell the night after we´d left… bad timing! But I´m also not sure how much fun it would have been to be in a tiny tent in the snow anyway, so I guess everything happens for a reason. The autumn colours got more and more vivid the higher into the mountains we went, and we became…

travel photography monsanto, central portugal

Autumn Road-trip – Monsanto

Last November, a few weeks before we left to spend Christmas in South Africa we went on a very spur-of-the-moment camping trip in central Portugal and the Serra da Estrela. I´d been wanting to explore this part of Portugal for ages, particularly the town of Monsanto and it´s little houses built into the boulder strewn hillside… it looked like something out of a fairytale and I really wanted to see it for myself. And so, while checking the weather report one day (I´m a total nerd for weather reports) I saw that we had a full week of sunny days…

travel photography klein karoo south africa

Karoo Road Trip – Ladismith to Calitzdorp

The distance between Ladismith and Calitzdorp really isn’t very far, but we took a bit of a detour to get there and wandered around on dirt roads for a few hours, chatting to Nguni cattle and enormous tortoises along the way… getting caught in the first of many thunderstorms and then witnessing the most dramatic sunset. The light in the Karoo is really unlike  anywhere else in the world…

Lisbon

Every time we come into Lisbon, for whatever reason, I always end up finding something new, discovering a side I hadn´t seen before or stumbling across a neigbourhood that we´d walked past a thousand times without ever really SEEING it. I love this city and I hope that I never stop being blown away by her changing faces, the subtle nuances, the play of light and shadow, old and new, silence and chaos. Lisboa, you have my heart.

travel photography spain

Spanish North Coast road trip – Day 8

Click here for Day 7: San Sebastian This was the last day of our rainy Spanish adventure and we didn´t really explore much since we had loads of ground to cover and not much time for anything except driving. We stopped briefly in Salamanca, which is packed with tourists in spite of the fact that it´s pretty much in the middle of nowhere… and also a tiny little town called Palenzuela where it appears they have more sheep than people… like New Zealand then, only much hotter. And so the story ends… we had a great time on this trip…

Spanish North Coast Road trip – Day 6: Mundaka to Zarautz

Click HERE for Day 5: Bilbao to Mundaka Day 6. Almost a week of being on the road and just as many days of rain. This was the day that we finally cracked. Up until this point we had been cheerful and optimistic… “tomorrow will be better” “there´s nothing we can do about it so we might as well just embrace the rain” and all manner of positive phrases that we bounced about between the 2 of us. But then, when trying to visit San Juan de Gaztelugatxe (which is supposed to look like THIS) we encountered mist and rain…