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joetru, Castelsardo (2026)

29/07/2020

Happy Wednesday Everyone! hope you are having a great week. Do you have a list of places that you want to visit again?

The photo today is from one of the places that I’ve visited that has surprised me the most: and in particular this town called . As you can see from my last post about Sardinia, the sunsets that I saw in the Island were amazing and this one couldn’t be any more striking.

I love Italy (who doesn’t), the food, the people, the culture, etc. When I visited Sardinia I had no expectations, I have a friend that is from there and when I visited he gave me a lot of great tips and one of them was to visit this town in the northwest part of the Island. Bear in mind that you have to be in good shape because the climbing up and down the hill is no easy feat but every corner of this town was an opportunity to take a great photo.

I visited this place on my own and although I wished I had my friends with me to see how beautiful it was, when photography is your hobby it can be a bit difficult to ask your friends constantly to stop to take a photo (although my friends are very patient with that), so this time I took advantage of being by myself to take all the photos that I wanted and even try new techniques.

One history fun fact about this town is that it was the last Spanish stronghold in the the Island of Sardinia from the 15th century until the 18th century, perhaps that’s the reason why I felt so at home in this island, as the culture and customs here felt very similar to home .

Sardinia is definitely one of the places I want to go back to.

Hope you have great day! @ Sardegna Castelsardo

27/07/2020

Happy Monday Everyone! hope you had a nice start of the week.

TodayI felt like I needed to post something about a calming and relaxing place and one of the best places I could think of was the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest in Kyoto. Ok, it really depends on when you visit it as it can be heaving with tourists but if you are lucky it can be one of those places where you really feel a calming and soothing energy flowing.

Just imagine, the wind blowing through the bamboos while you close your eyes, let the sounds of the leaves and the bamboos swaying while the sun moves along the intricate textures of the bamboo branches. Just the thought of it helps me relax.

In the world we live in and especially in the times we live in, learning how to relax and meditate is really important, otherwise the lizard part of our brain, the amygdala will be in a constant fight or flight response with the consequence of keeping us in a heightened state of alert. This has a whole lot of bad implications for our minds and our health, even though we may not recognise it at the time.

So learning how to relax and recuperate our center is not just something for yogis or health conscious people, it’s a necessity for all of us. It’s not always easy, I’m particularly finding it hard at the moment, but even more so when it’s the most difficult that’s when we need to make sure we are the strongest against that lizard in our brain

Hope you have a great Monday!

@ Arashiyama Bamboo Forest

24/07/2020

Happy Friday Everyone!

Today I’m going to deviate a bit from my usual postings and I’m going to post photos that I took this morning. So the trip today is 5 minutes from home to Victoria Park in London.

This past week I have been dog-sitting Skipper, I haven’t posted photos of her in a long time so for those of you who don’t know her, she’s my friend’s ’s dog but when he’s not around I pretend she’s mine and show off her cuteness around. I love animals in general but dogs are just my weakness and Skipper the leader among the canine kingdom, she just melts my heart. You really can’t have a bad day when she’s around.

Fun fact! Skipper is the inspiration of the logo of my company and she’s also heavily featured in our “Mobile Photography Masterclass”, that’s how important she is!

The other photos I’m posting are a collection of prints I’m preparing for my print shop which I also happened to shoot this morning, I’m pretty happy with the results and greens are not my strongest colour when it comes to editing (thanks .wilk for your guidance on this!). These will be sold as a limited set of 3 once my shop is open, if anyone is interested DM to be advised when they are released.

Hope you have a great day everyone, and don’t worry I’ll be posting more travel photos soon! @ Victoria Park

23/07/2020

Happy Thursday Everyone!

I’m quite late today in my posting and it’s because I’be been working hard on setting up my print’s shop.

I’ve had this photo for a while, I kept editing it but never really felt like it fit m Instagram feed, but when setting up the prints shop it fit right in the Architecture section along with the Skyscrapers photo that I posted a few days ago.

This is a photo pf the Umeda Sky Building in . The geometry of the building makes it very interesting, it’s like it’s built with lego pieces, but what I enjoyed the most were the hanging escalators that you can see crossing the top hole, the go through see-through tunnels where you can admire the height of the building.

Hope you have a great day! @ Umeda, Osaka, Japan

22/07/2020

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

time!! I was going through the 1000s of photos that I take during my trips and I'm trying to salvage some of them. Maybe I thought they were good at the time but when I look at some of them I can’t help to think “What was I thinking?”, sometimes I feel like a lost a lot of opportunities to take a good photo in a wonderful scenery.

Today I want to reflect on making mistakes. I was brought up in a culture where making mistakes was the worst thing you could do.

As an example, I got my first camera ever , a small Kodak one, when I was 6 years old. One of my most memorable gifts from my grandmother. For me it was like the gift of magic, I could capture in time the world around me, things that I found beautiful or important to me, so I took photos of: A plant pot in my terrace, the wall outside my window that had some graffitis and my favourite toy (earnie from sesame street). I quickly run through the 16 photos available in the roll (yes, this is way before digital photography). I was impatient for my father to develop the roll, but when he did he got so upset that I had taken photos of what seemed to him “worthless things” that he took the camera away from me and never saw it again.

My point here is that it would have been better, even as a little kid, to challenge me, to learn what was wrong with the photos and to gain a level of consciousness about improving that I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. it’s not a coincidence that the most resilient people are the ones that are not afraid to make mistakes, because they take them as a step and valuable lesson in their learning process. I feel that at least in my generation there was a lack of understanding just that.

I believe that teaching yourself the process of failing, analysing the mistakes and learning from them is the key to have a happier and more fulfilling life.

I took this photo on a sunset in Gili Trawangan near Bali and it's actually a crop from a photo that I failed at, the lightning wasn’t right, the camera settings weren’t right, even the composition wasn’t right. I tried to fix it to get the best possible result, but now I know how to get it right next time. @ Gili Trawangan

21/07/2020

Happy Tuesday Everyone! Any of you is on holiday at the moment? I’m not.

There is a traditional Spanish song that says “Sevilla tiene u color especial” (Seville’s colour is special), I’m not a huge fan of the song but I am a big fan of the city. It is a gorgeous city and you can feel that people from Seville are proud of it, as they care for it, maintain it clean and they speak wonders about their own city, to a point that sometimes can seem cocky. When you visit the city you realise that everything they say is true.

This makes me think about pride, what a strange thing pride is. Too much of it can be off-putting but too little of it will put people off for sure. Sometimes the opposite of pride is humility, but the lack of it can be seem as false humility. It’s one of those things that it’s difficult to get the balance of.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people for jobs and one thing that I would notice is when people were proud of themselves, what they have achieved and most of all what they could achieve. To me as an interviewer, it was definitely a positive thing.

Then why is it so hard sometimes for us to feel proud!

Doing a bit of research and this is what I’ve found out the concept of “pride” means psychologically: Pride is an emotional state deriving positive affect from the perceived value of a person or thing with which the subject has an intimate connection. They key word here is “positive”.

As you might have noticed I have been posting lately how my photos would look as framed prints hanging on walls, the reason why I’m doing that is because I’m setting up my photography online print shop and when doing it, I have to make a bog conscious effort to quiet down my inner saboteur, that may or may note tell me that I’m or they are not good enough.

I’ve been a freelance for 5 years and by far the most difficult part of it is using my pride to be able to offer my services to clients, to a point that it can hinder my possibility of reaching out or acquiring new clients. It’s a constant battle and I’m curious if any of you also have a similar battle with your own self-saboteur ,

This is a photo of the wonderful Sevilla

Have a lovely day! @ Giralda

20/07/2020

Happy Monday Everyone! Hope you are having a nice start of the week.

Short post today, no mysteries or ancient ruins, actually quite the opposite. A landscape that is very close to home, the City of London. A photo I took about a month ago when Lockdown started easing and the weather was beautiful.
@ The City

19/07/2020

Happy Sunday Everyone! And today I’m taking you to another mystery in a different side of the world.

The Bayon Temple in Angkor Thom in Cambodia. This temple is also know as the Faces Temple. The mystery here is who those faces belong to, but I’ll talk a bit more of that later on.

First I would like to talk about my personal experience with this temple. The first time I visited it was in 2007 and I have been there three other times ever since and every single time I have felt the spirituality of this temple like I have never felt it anywhere else. Maybe it’s because of all those gentle faces that watch over you in every corner of the temple from above, but the truth is that there is something especial about this temple.

The temple had 37 towers with faces (originally it had 49), most of them being crowned with 4 faces although some only have 3 and one of them has 1. If you stare at those faces you will notice the serenity, the peace that they exude, it’s almost like watching someone sleep a peaceful sleep to a point that even though they are made of several pieces of rock, there is a humanity to them.

There are many theories as to what these faces are, some archeologist believing that they represent Lokeshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, while others think it’s the face of the king that built the temple: Jayavarman VII.

There are 216 faces carved into the stones that make up the 54 towers of the Bayon Temple. Many compare the serene and happy look of the faces to the Mona Lisa.

The face temple,” as it’s also known for, was built in the XII century and it exudes both power and humanity, two essential qualities of any successful leader and it symbolises both the strength and compassion of the Khmer Empire and the king himself

If you ever visit this temple, close your eyes, forget about the other tourists and let your other senses experience what for me is always a very unique and beautiful experience.

Have a great day! @ Bayon Temple, Siem Reap

17/07/2020

Happy Thursday Everyone! Today I’m choosing a photo of another mystery site the Urquhart Castle situated in the shores of Loch Ness.

I asume all of us have heard of the mystery of the Monster of the Loch Ness or as close friends and acquaintances call her Nessy!

I love Scotland, it has some of the most breathtaking scenarios in the UK and a few years ago when we organised a trip with my mum to go to Scotland we had to make a stop at the Lock Ness, which let’s be honest has been uncanny at marketing themselves as a site of mystery, with sightings and sonar detections of the alleged monster.

In 1994 Christian Spurling, whose stepfather Marmaduke Wetherell was a friend of Wilson’s, the first person to take a photo of the monster and probably the most famous one, said that his stepfather and Wilson arranged the stunt.

Wetherell had been the subject of public ridicule in 1933 after he found what he thought to be series of giant footprints on a Lochside beach and claimed they were proof there was something out there, they were actually just marks of an umbrella stand.

Spurling confessed before he died that the picture was of a toy submarine with a fake head attached and was staged to take revenge for his stepfather’s humiliation.

Regardless of wether there is a Monster or not, the lake is gorgeous, a really beautiful site and worth the visit on its own merits.

I have spoken!

Have a great day!!

@ Loch Ness

16/07/2020

Happy Thursday Everyone! Anyone curious about The Templars?

I’m going to make you travel to Segovia, I recently posted a photo of its Roman Aqueduct, perhaps it’s most famous and oldest feature, but there are many other interesting and cool things that my 1 day trip to this city allowed me to see.

I started my trip with a clear Itinerary, I only had a few hours in the city and I had to make the most of it, so visiting the Aqueduct (I always have to look up how to spell that word!) , the Cathedral, The main Square, the Alcazar and eat at one of the many traditional restaurants there were part of my itinerary.

But when I was at the top of the bell tower in the Cathedral I saw in the distance this small isolated church. I asked the someone and they told me that this was the Templar Church “Iglesia de Veracruz” built in the XIII century. Did she just say templars? I got all excited all the sudden. I had to see it!

If you had read the Da Vinci Code you probably know about the mysteries that surround the order of the Templars, for meet was another series of books that got me all excited about them: The Children of the Grail by Peter Berling. I’m not sure if they are still in print but if you like that kind of historic novel I highly recommend them, as another of my favourite authors, Ken Follett, does. Peter Berling mixes History and fiction in a very exciting and entertaining way that you end up not knowing what was true facts and what was the product of his imagination. Fun fact is that the series is composed by 5 lengthy books and when I only had 100 pages to finish the last book I forgot it in a taxi and never got around to read the ending of the series. Maybe one day!

Anyway as excited as I was to see this church from the distance, it was a bit of a walk from the Cathedral and if you know any travel photographer you will know that our attention span is shorter than the one of a goldfish, and we get distracted by every possibility of a good photo. By the time I got to the church it was already closed, the sun was setting and I still had to take photos of the Disney-like Alcazar. So I only managed to take this photo from the outside.

Have a great day! @ Iglesia De La Vera Cruz - Orden de Malta España

14/07/2020

Happy Tuesday Everyone! Are you planning any trips soon?

Today I’m posting a photo I took the other night of Madrid’s “Puerta de Alcala”. This gate is now very central but when it was built in 1778 when Madrid was va very small city. Commissioned by King Charles III this gate is crossed by one of Madrid’s main arteries the calle Alcalá.

A fun fact about the calle de Alcalá is that this street is considered a cañada real (special route for the seasonal migration of livestock), and sheep used to flock regularly crossed through the Puerta de Alcalá, now this practise only happens once a year around October /November and if you are present at the time you will see around 2000 sheep and goats crossing central Madrid.

Photography is a constant learning process and I wanted to take advantage of my recent trip to Madrid to experiment with the usual monument people would take photos of, so here are two of my experiments.

Hope you enjoy them. @ Puerta de Alcalá

13/07/2020

Happy Monday Everyone! Local tourism season started!

I needed to have a purple photo in my post today I really did, but I had a problem, I couldn’t find a good enough photo with purple shades in my vault of photos, soI decided to put into practise what I said in the beginning of this pandemic and do some Local tourism.

It turns out that not too far from London, about 1 hour away on public transport, you can visit the wonderful farm, a family run organic lavender farm that creates a breathtaking scenery. It seems that I wasn’t the only one that thought about this as when I got there it was full of people, oh well the era of Instagram people.

One thing that you may not know about me is my addiction to smells. Ok, stop your dirty thoughts there, I mean good natural smells of essential oils used in aromatherapy.

I think as a human species our sense of smell is one of the ones that we neglect the most, we hardly think about it! yes we punish it with pollution, smoke and all kids of artificial smells that the only thing they achieve is to damage it, so it wouldn’t surprise me if in future evolutions of the human species that sense disappears. Some big companies know the power of this sense, since we don’t think about it much, the information we receive through it goes straight to our subconscious part of the brain and through this these companies manage to steer us towards their products, have you ever passed by one of those shops called LUSH that sell soaps? that’s a clear example, although whenever I’m close to one of those shops I get a migraine because of how they smell, so they achieve the opposite with me.

Anyway, I’m digressing here. My two favourite essential oils are Lemongrass and Lavender. Both of them help relieve stress and anxiety but Lavender has also some calming properties that help you have a good night sleep.

You can imagine how this field smelled, it was just wonderful, but it was also very reinvigorating to be in such a beautiful place surrounded by nature.

Have a great Monday! @ Mayfields Lavender Fields

joetru

29/07/2020

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23/07/2020

22/07/2020

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20/07/2020

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