Out and About II - Kuwait

Another outing organized by the AWARE Center a few weeks ago was an evening with a guided tour through the "House of Mirrors". It is a residential house where the lady of the house, Lidia Al-Qattan, basically went nuts 20 or so years ago and started covering walls in bits of colored glass and bits of mirrors...grand mosaics to small little details: doorways, hallways, doors and floors, radiators, lamps, stove, the stairway to the 2nd floor. Basically the outside of the house and the entire first floor are covered in bits of mirror. She was a very friendly and animated hostess/guide and her stories about how it all began and the various rooms were funny and entertaining.

The second floor was more dedicated to the art work of her late husband, Khalifa Al Qattan and some of her other interests and her own artwork, planets, the universes...harmony ...all illustrated with colored lights, painted carpet and sculpture.

Here are a few of the photos I took. All 22 can be seen on photobucket...HERE.

Fish - House of Mirrors, Kuwait



Paint on Carpet - House of Mirrors, Kuwait




Reflections (Imagine That!) - House of Mirrors, Kuwait



Lights - House of Mirrors, Kuwait




Reflections II - House of Mirrors, Kuwait

Out and About - Kuwait

I'm trying to get/stay on top of things with regards to the photos I take here in Kuwait. Just a week or so ago we went on a tour of the Arab Organizations Building organized by the AWARE Center. It is a bland building from the outside (as all but a very few of the ultra modern glass towers are here) but the inside has art work and design work worthy of writing home blogging about.

Here are a couple of teaser photos and a link to a slideshow (as yet uncaptioned:)

Entrance Foyer - Arab Organizations Building, Kuwait




Screen - Arab Organizations Building, Kuwait




Water Fountain - Arab Organizations Building, Kuwait




Entrance to Sitting Room - Arab Organizations Building, Kuwait

I'm Famous...

or maybe obscure...

I was reading a photography forum and a reference was made to how you can use google to search for a particular image. (if interested, see http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searchbyimage.html)

The discussion centered around copyright infringement...basically stealing people's photographs posted on line and either claiming them as your own, or using them without attribution (and compensation) or the worst I guess, selling them. Being the curious type, I searched a few of my photos and was shocked...SHOCKED I tell you, to find that some of my photos have been used without attribution:

Possibly my favorite photo of all time, blogged HERE
Shows up at a travel site page about Kakadu HERE

One of my very recent photos taken while on a return visit to Sarajevo, taken from Shelby's balcony. Shows up in a thread "The Skylines in Eastern Europe"

One of my Plitvice photos shows up in a thread all in Cyrillic that I can't read.

A Lake Bled photo is linked on another travel site

And my blog entry about Sutjeska Monument has photos showing up a number of times including twice on this site.

Last, one of my earliest blogged photos is apparently "for sale" or for upload to your facebook account...it's making me rich!

The coolest part though, is how many people apparently look like an elephant....or a tombstone (see the "Visually similar images" :)

It is also cool how google tries to figure out where and what of the photo is taken.

A Day in Dubrovnik

Lot of links in this one...could keep the curious among my many readers quite busy...

Although we ended up going back a number of times, the first trip we took to Dubrovnik in late January of 2007 was one of our last as the original 5...the weather was great and we had a good time. My original blog entry was Here.
I took a huge number of photos that day as did Ryan and Shelby.

A later trip to Croatia that included a stop in Dubrovnik I also blogged Here and put a slideshow of our friends' entire visit on photobucket. At least one other trip to Dubrovnik didn't even warrant a mention in the blog.

I've been trying to organize things lately and when I started keywording the photos from that time period... (and ironically, I blogged about my lack of organization with regards to my photographs using a photo from this original trip Here) I realized how many I liked that were taken in just that one day. So I processed a bunch of them over the past few days and here is a sample of the results.... the entire slideshow can be seen on photobucket, I've still have a few to add, and the photos haven't been captioned yet....that may be asking too much of me...enjoy.

Silhouette and the Sea - Dubrovnik, Croatia




Water Drain - Dubrovnik, Croatia





Flag Above the Walls - Dubrovnik, Croatia




The Walled City - Dubrovnik, Croatia




Cross Above Dubrovnik, Croatia