Hitchcock reloaded: the Swiss syndrome
Winter seagulls looking for (and finding) food on the shores of Lake Zurich. Click on each picture to magnify.
Love is … on a cold Autumn eve on Lake Zurich
Love is a dark silhouette … invisible without a colourful background.
Pictures shot hand-held in the darkness of a November eve thanks to Nikon D800 plus Nikon f/1.4 50 mm (f/1.6 ISO 800 1/100 sec)
Through the rough Judean desert to the calm shores of the Dead Sea (Israel)
Through the desert where Satan tempted Jesus for 40 days and 40 nights …
you can meet the ruins of an abandoned settlement at the side of the motor road:
a black, hot ribbon that cuts through a couple of check-points to reach the shores of the Dead Sea.
Pools of water evaporation
stretch from Israel border East to Jordan, at the other side of the Dead Sea.
Enjoy the colours and shapes of this waters containing 34% of salt (10 times more than Mediterranean sea)
and its atolls made out precipitated salt
Relax by floating on the water surfaces
but keep this extremely salty water out of mouth and eyes… otherwise …
Click on each picture to magnify. Pictures shot with D800 plus 70-200 f/2.8 or 16-35 f/4
Come to Acre (Israel): 5000 years of history await you.
First traces of Acre date back to Heracles, who once upon a time healed his wounds exactly here (!) …
Here the markets met Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, King Herod, Paul the Apostle and Marco Polo.
These walls and tunnels were built and destroyed and re-built by crusaders and mamluks, conquered by Richard the Lionheart and Philip II Roi de France.
Pay a visit to Acre Mosque, erected by the Sultan Jazzar Pasha, aka “the Butcher”
This is Acre harbour, where the defeated Napoleon watched for the last time the towers of Acre …
In memory of Lorna Katharine Alison Mills, died Sept. 3rd 1924, aged 9 months, in Haifa, Israel
While wandering in an abandoned cemetery between Haifa railway and harbour, the only engrave I could read (click the picture to zoom) strongly caught my attention: “Heu Quanto Minus Est Cum Reliquis Versari, Quam Tui Meminisse!”
My poor Latin knowledge made me anyway translate: “How little there is to bury, compared to what you remind me“. That sentence got stuck into my mind and today what a surprise by googling it … it is the title of a sonnet:
The sweetest flower that ever saw the light, The smoothest stream that ever wandered by, The fairest star upon the brow of night, Joying and sparkling from his sphere on high, The softest glances of the stockdove’s eye, The lily pure, the mary–bud gold–bright, The gush of song that floodeth all the sky From the dear flutterer mounted out of sight,– Are not so pleasure–stirring to the thought, Not to the wounded soul so full of balm, As one frail glimpse, by painful straining caught Along the past’s deep mist–enfolded calm, Of that sweet face, not visibly defined, But rising clearly on the inner mind. (Henry Alford, 1810-1871)
Eighty-nine years passed since this stranger baby died, still such a huge pain touched my heart.
