I was lucky enough to make my first trip to Portugal at the beginning of May 2009, travelling through Coimbra and Porto. I didn’t get as much of an opportunity to take photos as I’d have liked – it was the annual student 1st May festival and Coimbra was packed with students and tourists, plus trying to herd small children and take photos simultaneously presented its usual challenge.
So I tried something I’ve experimented a bit with before – taking photos through the car window. The traffic was bad enough, and Coimbra’s one-way system complex enough that we spent a good while stationary in traffic with some photo opportunities. This is one of the better ones – fortunately our hire car had cleaner windows than our own car!
The old post office building is 1930’s style (I love 1930’s architecture) and was naturally fairly monochromatic, with white stone and black lettering. The car windscreen had reduced the contrast quite a lot though so I added a true monochrome layer in Gimp and set it to overlay mode to increase the contrast. I quite like the graphical effect of this even though the composition isn’t that great. I have a bit of a leaning-vertical issue here as well, but didn’t go to the effort of correcting it, maybe I should have done.
. At the time this, combined with general disillusionment and some fairly major computer issues, was enough for me to give it a bit of a break. But then my maternity leave came to an end, I went back to work and I just didn’t have the time to take, process and post a photo every single day. In fact, for a good while I didn’t take any photos at all, didn’t log on to flickr, and didn’t look at my 365 project at all.
