v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

A Month in Lima

This has most likely been the largest gap in my posting in over 15 years. I think I have been trying to avoid the news and the common thinking which resides in the States which is negativism and magical conspiracy thinking replacing any sort of critical thinking. Or perhaps its that I've been busy seeing family and getting things fixed at our apartment. Here is a first drop of fotos:

From Pasadena

I was in Pasadena this last week for work and got a chance to photograph parts of Pasadena and The Langham Hotel:

Vallejo Nocturno 2022-Pasadena

Images Over Last Three Weeks

I forget in these fast times to share here some of the images I've encountered during the last couple of weeks. Was in Chicago into another element,

Vallejo Nocturno 2022- Menjunje Ensemble and Chicago

From our Visit to Dehli's Red Fort

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- At Red Fort, Dehli, India 2011

Some Images from Lisboa 2016

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Fotos de Lisboa

Walkthrough of Se de Lisboa

I found this excellent video of the ancient Se de Lisboa (Lisboa Cathedral) it's a compelling way to show the character of a structure.

Dinosaur Land

About 38 years ago we went to see friends in Virginia and on our way home we came across a roadside attraction that was out of a John Waters movie. A small amusement park with life size dinosaurs on the side of the road. I took lots of photographs including infrareds but these are my black and whites which I just recently digitized in August. Here's a link for the place which still exists:

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Dinosaur Land in 1982

Some More Images from South Africa 2008

After the conference in Cape Town, we took a side trip to Franshhoek, a wine region, about a couple of hours from the coast. In addition to its excellent wines the food we encountered in the region was of very high quality with the freshest produce imaginable.

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Scenes from Franshhouk, South Africa

Some South Africa Images from 2008

Vallejo Nocturno 2020-Cape of Good Hope in 2008

The Most Famous Man in the World after Napoleon

Vallejo Nocturno 2014- Humboldt Statue in Berlin

From Brainpickings an article on Alexander Humboldt:

No thinker has shaped our understanding of the astounding interconnectedness of the universe more profoundly than the great Prussian naturalist, explorer, and geographer Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859), who pioneered the notion that the natural world is a web of intricately entwined elements, each in constant dynamic dialogue with every other — a concept a century ahead of its time. His legacy isn’t so much any single discovery — although he did discover the magnetic equator, invented isotherms, and came up with climate zones — as it is a mindset, a worldview, a singular sensemaking sublimity.

Goethe, in his conversations with Eckermann, remarked that a single day with Humboldt enriched him more than years spent alone, enthusing:

What a man he is! … He has not his equal in knowledge and living wisdom. Then he has a many-sidedness such as I have found nowhere else. On whatever point you approach him, he is at home, and lavishes upon us his intellectual treasures. He is like a fountain with many pipes, under which you need only hold a vessel, and from which refreshing and inexhaustible streams are ever flowing.

Darwin asserted that Humboldt’s writings kindled in him a zeal without which he wouldn’t have boarded the Beagle or written On the Origin of Species. Thoreau was an ardent admirer of Humboldt’s “habit of close observation,” without the influence of which there might have been no Walden. Trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell, who met Humboldt weeks before his death, marveled in her diary that “no young aspirant in science ever left Humboldt’s presence uncheered,” and his ideas reverberate through her famous assertion that science is “not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.” Emerson, in his essays and lectures, called Humboldt “a man whose eyes, ears, and mind are armed by all the science, arts, and implements which mankind have anywhere accumulated” and saw him as living proof that “a certain vastness of learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible.”