Annalia S.'s photos

A pair of Egyptian geese taking a rest on the Lungarno wall seemed to be contemplating the palazzos across the Arno River. Happy Fence Friday, everyone!

Didn't make it in time to post an HFF yesterday, but still wanted to say hi to everyone and wish you all a happy new year! In the photo, a persimmon tree against winter fog.

Wishing everyone the best for this holiday season and for the new year. May we have good cheer despite it all and find strength and warmth wherever it can be had. May we have patience with those we just cannot understand, determination to continue to strive for our battered planet and time, health and good light for our photography!

Rollerskating rink at Villa Vogel Park in the last light. Wishing everyone also a nice time together with your loved ones for the holidays!

Happy Fence Friday, everyone! Have a great pre-holiday weekend!

A couple of young friends who live in the neighborhood just had a daughter and when I saw this pink bow on the gate of a nearby condominium I couldn't help fantasising about the two girls growing up here, going to the same school, maybe even becoming friends some day. As difficult as the future seems to look for the new generations, I still felt a little warm spot for these two little ladies who might some day join hands in friendship. HFF, everyone! Be careful, get your boosters and have a great weekend.

Climate change is often subtle. Floods, devastating forest fires, catastrophic draughts, extreme weather phenomena, the disappearance of glaciers: all of these are macroscopic effects of the changes our climate is undergoing. They are striking, profoundly unsettling and impossible to miss (although I find that, lately, the human capacity for denying even the obvious seems to be more and more on display …). Still, there are changes that are not so obvious and yet no less disturbing. One of these is the disruption of seasonal patterns on which much of life, especially plant life, depends. This is often harder to pin-point clearly. Farmers have had their crops ruined by insufficient precipitation or unseasonal frosts since time immemorial and we tend not to notice that these effects are becoming, gradually but steadily, more and more common. The plant life (and the animal life that depends on it, ours included) that thrives in the areas were we live is adapted to the local seasonal patterns and depends on them. Nature is resilient and plants and animals can, for the most part, withstand an occasional disruption, but when the changes in pattern become more and more frequent resilience will not be enough. The vegetation we are used to seeing around us will begin to suffer, pests that were kept at bay by cold winters will wreak more and more damage when winter temperatures fail to dip under a certain threshold for several winters in a row, lower levels of precipitation will wipe out plant life that depends on the presence of sufficient moisture. The animals that feed on those plants will go hungry and, if the disruption repeats itself year after year, will either move elsewhere or die out. The entire local ecological balance, that took centuries or millennia to become established, will be thrown out of kilt. Even our supposedly insulated, selfish human world will eventually be changed beyond recognition. Foods that we consider staples will become luxuries (this article explains how a drop in production of durum wheat is affecting the pasta making industry in Italy, for example, www.reuters.com/business/worst-come-pasta-makers-fret-over-durum-wheat-supply-crunch-2021-11-10 potentially increasing the price of a food that every Italian household depends on and is frequently part of at least one meal a day if not two.) The life style we have known, the activities we are accustomed to will go through an enormous upheaval. As photographers, we train ourselves to keep an eye out for things that most people miss. I know that, since I became interested in photography, I have developed a greater sensitivity to light conditions, for example, or an eye for details that others might not notice. Even without a camera, I often catch myself “composing” or “framing” images in my mind as I go through my daily life. I think we have almost a duty to use these skills to communicate the plight of the environment around us, to highlight these subtle changes that so often go unnoticed in people’s busy lives. I know, it’s almost certainly too late to reverse the changes, but by educating people and putting pressure on governments blinded by the god of economy, it could still be slowed down, giving us and the environment a little more time to adapt to a world that is, inevitably, becoming hotter and drier, losing costal lands (and whole islands) and being deprived of biodiversity as countless vegetable and animal species get wiped out.

Light shines through graffiti sprayed onto the translucent sound barrier and the old fence by the railroad tracks, while a wet platanus bark contributes its more somber colors and more natural designs. HFF, everyone, and have a colourful weekend!

Most of my life I have been a night owl. If I got to work at 9:00 a.m., it would be 11:00, if not noon, by the time my brain actually started moving at anything like the required speed and my most productive time was always in the late afternoon and into the evening. Not anymore. Old turkey that I am getting to be, by 4:00, 4:30 p.m., with at least another hour left in my work day, I start losing concentration and making mistakes. So I step outside for a 10 minute break, to clear my head, think of something else. This time of year, with the autumn colors in the nearby park and the resident birds cleaning up the berries on the courtyard bushes, I find plenty of sights to divert my attention from work matters. On this particular day, however, I had no sooner stepped outside that my photographer’s eye caught something that sent me scampering back upstairs. “That was a mighty short break ….” commented my colleague. I grabbed my camera out of my purse and promised to explain later. Light, you see, doesn’t leave you time for chit chat if you want to catch it at the right time. What you see here is the deeply ridged driveway ramp that leads down to the underground garage at my work place. Just before setting below the nearby land features, the light from the sun was coming in at a low angle and illuminating only the very top of the ridges. A lone fallen leaf from a nearby tree, still in its pretty autumn livery, seemed to have chosen this particular spot as a final resting place, going out in style with a little help from the westering sun. I am always thrilled by this kind of images, where mundane, everyday things turn out to have a claim to beauty. They remind me of the advice my art teacher father would obsessively give his students: “The subject matter of your best work will always be what you see around you everyday, the stuff you can picture in detail even with your eyes closed, that you know as intimately as the inside of your pockets.” As his students were rural kids, what they knew best were cows, chickens, barns, the woods, the mountains. They usually balked, at least at first, at this advice. “That’s boring stuff! “ they complained, “we want to draw interesting things, you know, stuff like spaceships, castles and unicorns, airplanes and race cars …” But, of course, he was right: their pictures of far away places and things they knew little about lacked detail, were naive and even a bit ridiculous or at best commonplace. By contrast, an oil painting by one of his students, featuring a maze of ink-black, intricate tree boles in the woods, with leaves in lurid colors that seemed to be flying in your face, was for years the centre piece on our living room wall. It had a dark, ominous quality that told the story of an adventure turned dangerous, of having wandered too deep into the woods and lost your way, of a familiar place turned scary when a storm hid the sun and plunged it in darkness. To this day, I still see that painting clearly in my mind’s eye.

I took this picture several years ago near a bend of the Piave River that is known as Fontane di Nogaré from a subterranean spring that feeds the river at this point. The mountains in the background are the Belluno Dolomites. It's a beautiful place and I will let you enjoy its charms for a moment before I tell you what is wrong with this picture. What is wrong is that this was taken in December, a time of year when, at the very least, the mountain tops should be laden with snow. Climate change has made the sight of the naked Dolomites more and more common in the last several winters. And no snow on the mountains in winter means no water reservoir feeding the rivers in spring and summer, which in turn affects the irrigation of the Padana Plain, the bread basket of Italy, where most of our crops are grown. This was the first year I remember when there was absolutely no snow on the mountains, not even a sprinkling, but since then it has become a fairly common sight, along with dried out lakes and disappearing mountain streams. Sights I never would have expected to see in a land that when I was a kid was so rich in water that waterfalls were an ubiquitous sight whenever we went hiking.

This bit of green fence blocks people from venturing onto an old milldam that is no longer stable. I liked the incongruity of a fence in the middle of nowhere and the fall vegetation on the river bank. HFF and have a nice weekend, everyone!

The last stragglers head home from Villa Vogel Park after the last sunlight abandons a recently vacated bench. Have a good week ahead everyone! Or at least as good as can be had, with Covid surges and violent protests ... P.S.Posting a bit early as I will not be able to tomorrow until quite late.

Fences and vines have a natural affinity for each other and autumn is when it shows its full colors! :) HFF everyone and have a great weekend! P.S. Thinking of all our friends in the northern European countries that are dealing with the scary and discouraging Covid surges.

I don't know if she was waiting for somebody, taking a moment to reflect on life or simply enjoying the view from the bridge parapet, but her "Red Riding Hood" called my attention.

Public use bikes parked by the tram line stop at the Cascine Park. I wanted a tram car in the picture too, but by the time the tram got there, the light was gone :( That's autumn weather for you! HFF and may you have great light all weekend long!

Two friends pause on a bench enjoying the view of the river and the reconverted Old Mill on the opposite bank. HBM and have a nice week ahead, everyone! P.S. Posting this now because I'll be busy till late tomorrow.

Interstate exit ramp. Just give Nature a bit of purchase and She'll find a way to make art anywhere! Happy Festooned Autumn Fence Friday, everyone, and have a great weekend!