I had an exploration in mind but got confused about just where the "trail" I took--more of a plunge that cattle use to get from from highway level down into a canyon--met the stream at the bottom, so I went upstream instead of down but had a beautiful hike anyway. Consulting the map again later, I saw where I had gone wrong, and saw that the canyon I was looking for does exist, but in a different location...anyway, it can wait.

Depending where I was in this canyon, it was either sunny and mild or dark and snow-covered. For these wintry images I used my DSLR; if you want to see a couple of sunny ones check out the Smartphone section (it might take me a while to get to that). The best part about it was not seeing any other human tracks except on the trail leading down the mountain. I hope you enjoy these. I tried a couple of different processing treatments, and some are in B/W, but I didn't feel like putting those in a separate section so buck up.

INTRODUCTION - For several years now I have been facing a traveling photographers dilemma: Enjoying all the new vistas and experience on many different levels that extensive, long-staged traveling brings - and at the same time working timely and intelligently on the ten thousand or so images that I return with from each trip. Add to that the enjoyable, extremely rewarding but very time-intensive periods I spend here on UHH with presenting the albums I posted on my website. Since my first priority is still the traveling, substantially interrupted during the first two Covid-19 years, my actual working on my pictures and the subsequent creation of travel photo albums has pretty much ground to a halt. I have actually just started working recently on the images of a trip to Europe we undertook in the spring of 2017, until now basically untouched, and heaven only knows when I can complete these images and create the albums, as in March I will already embark on another quite lengthy trip.

But towards the end of every year, I make a special effort to work on a small sampling of my images taken during the current year to include these in my annual calendar for our families. These pictures are mainly chosen based on the specific requirements of a calendar and are thus not necessarily representative of the final contents of the albums to eventually follow. Besides this initial selection, I sometimes chose a few additional photos that I am just too curious to see how they could develop, and this short body of selections forms a first base for my future album work. Since I have already worked on this sampling, I have started in the past few years to post an "Annual Interim Trip Selection Album" on my photo website.

Now I want to take this one step further and make a short presentation of some of these images here at UHH. This will not be one of my lengthy, properly researched and arranged trip presentations that I have done in the past, but rather a loosely organized combination of some of the highlights of the past year. As such, I will go very lightly on the peripheral information on the locations and subject information, but will state some of the most essential data and provide some links. I first intended to do this presentation without my customary trip maps, but decided to include these anyway as, given my age, the final trip albums might never materialize.

Also, in the past I have adhered to a self-imposed restriction to only post one set per day, to make sure that my presentations were not "hogging" the limelight, following the same way as it seems many other posters were then also doing. I have been absent for quite a while from UHH and when I recently returned, I noticed that the limitation of 30 posts to make it into the daily digest does no longer seem to exist and I see many multiple posts by individuals. Since I will shortly be traveling again, I now take the liberty of also doing multiple posts, but will still limit these to two per day. I hope this is acceptable in the present circumstances, as it will permit me to keep the posting period shorter and give me time to prepare for my upcoming trip.

This presentation series will cover images I took in 2023, as well as in 2022 and just about all pictures are from Europe. I will first cover our trips in 2023, where we visited Europe twice: For 77 days from the end of March to the beginning of June, starting out in the southern UK and then moving over to Paris where we spent 10 days in our favorite city on this globe. After Paris, we continued into the Loire River Valley and then on to Burgundy. Most of the remaining time we spent in Switzerland, with a 10-day trip down to the island of Corfu/Greece and a day-trip over to nearby Albania, virtually a stone-throw from Corfu. Our 59 days summer trip took place from late July to mid-September and covered first a week at Lake Garda in northern Italy, followed by another week in southern Tuscany, then we headed into the Eastern Alps in Italy, followed by parts of Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and finally Switzerland.

In 2022 we were still somewhat hampered by Covid-19, so during our spring trip we mainly visited Switzerland, with an interesting week down in Rome. In summer of 2022, we started out with a week in southern France in the hills above Nice, then covered various areas of Switzerland, with a 10-day trip over the UK.

More details will be forthcoming as we get into the individual posts.

EQUIPMENT - As far as my photo gear is concerned, the 2023 images were taken with my new Nikon Z7II body with a 48mp sensor and my new Nikkor 24-120/4 S lens, a 2022 Christmas present to myself. As I shoot only in RAW, of course all images had to be resized to fit into the mp limitation on this site. For 2022, the images were taken with my then aging Nikon D610, with the older but similar Nikkor 18-120mm lens. As usual, I processed all my images in Lightroom Classic.

The structure of my comments for each picture will generally show first the area of the country, followed by the exact location and then a brief explanation of the subject.

This "organizational overview" page will be referenced on every subsequent post for ease of reference and orientation.
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TODAY'S POST:
This first set brings you 10 images from our stay in March/April 2023 in the United Kingdom and covers a few places around the town of Ascot in Berkshire where the family of our daughter lives, as well as a few impressions from a couple of extended drives, west to Cirencester at the edge of the Cotswolds, east to the delightful town of Rye in East Sussex where on the return drive I captured a few shots of the Bodiam castle, and finally to Salisbury in Wiltshire and the nearby famous Stonehenge Megalithic Circle. A few more similar images of the UK locations can be seen on my photo-webpage.

The following links provide further information, provided from Wikipedia, for the major places in this post - they are quite voluminous and I do not expect you to read these but for completeness' sake, I provide them so that those interested in more information have easy access:

CIRENCESTER - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirencester
BODIAM CASTLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodiam_Castle
SALISBURY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salisbury
STONEHENGE MEGALITHIC CIRCLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge

Thanks for visiting, I recommend viewing the downloads and look forward to your comments and questions.

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