The Road Ahead

Another year rolls by, and we strive to make resolutions which we try to stick to throughout the year. Well, this year, I'm going to try soemthing different. I'm not going to make resolutions. I'm going to fly by the seat of my pants - something I don't usually do, but would love to do more of. So, here's to NOT making resolutions - Happy New Year everybody!

This was taken in driving through the lake district in Scotland - sceneries like this are pretty common driving through there. I thought this was a fitting picture to start the new year, as the name suggests. Hope good things are in store for everybody!

It was nice to see that my blog was one of the finalists for the best new photoblog and the best American photoblog over at photoblogawards.com - thank you to everyone who voted! Congrats to also Francesco and Ilan for making that list.

Ephemeral

I've never seen a castle - a lot of people might say that even after seeing Duffus Castle, I still haven't seen a real one, but this was the first castle we just happened upon while trying to find a totally different place - which we never found. This place, although a tourist spot was totally deserted in favor of the more complete castles in other places around the area, which was fine by me, because it gave me a chance to get a sense of the place without a mob of people. As you can see, most of it is in shambles, and very few walls are still erect. I suspect that within a few more years, the rest of the walls will come down. Makes me think about everything we build, and how attached we get to it and how temporary they all really are.... I'm off for rest of the year, and so this will effectively be the last post of the year. For everybody that is still reading this, and have been with me till the end of the year, I wish you a very Happy New Year! See you in 2010!!

Weathered

Most people that know me know that I have a fascination with benches. There are many reasons for this, but the main reason being the bench is a constant relative to time; it's like a living-breathing entity, like a watchdog, that provides a seat for anybody that passes by, and is a silent witness to everything that surrounds it. I like to imagine what it has seen, what it has experienced, and the people who used it and the circumstances that led them to this bench.

The location of the bench often reveals how much it has seen. This bench is located on the extreme north coast of Scotland, in Buckie. It's like a sleepy New England town, with a pretty low population, and this seashore is mostly a tourist town, so when we visited in October, there was almost nobody there. But as you can see, the walls and the bench have both taken a beating from mother nature, and endured quite a bit of non-human contact. I decided to ignore the 2/3rd rule for this one, because I thought the starkness of the surrounding of this bench was important, and I wanted to show the bench in its very lonely state.... hope it worked :-/