Lens-Artists Challenge #341: Personal Favourites

Lens-Artists Challenge #341: Personal Favourites

This week it's the turn of Tina, from Travels and Trifles, to host the Challenge, and her theme is 'Personal Favourites' (https://wordpress.com/reader/feeds/2577833/posts/5605625570). 'If you are anything like me, you have thousands of images in your collection', says Tina. 'I set out to choose a small number of favorites (sic) to use as my new computer’s screensavers. ... So this week your challenge is to choose no more than 5 images as your all-time personal favorites.' So here are five images that mean a lot to me. They're not perfect, by any stretch, and they're probably not my favourites of all time, which is an impossible choice, but each is special for one reason or another. 

I came across this first image while I was looking for some portraits for last week’s Challenge set by Ritva. It's very old, over 10 years I reckon, and was taken at a medieval festival in Troviscal. These used to be really common in Portugal, though I'm not sure if they are as popular since the Pandemic. This gentleman was a actually a lecturer at the University of Coimbra, and a leading light in Vive Arte, a group that would travel the country putting on medieval shows. He would dress up as a leper at sit under a tree all day. Nice job if you can get it.

The second image was one of my favourite surfing images. I forget the name of this surfer, but he was a regular visitor to the Praia da Barra and was really good. On this day the waves weren't too high, and because the beach was sloping down to the sea I had an excellent view of the surfers from a higher vantage point. So when the surfer twisted his board on the wave it gave this fabulous result. 

My third image is from the Gameboy, well there had to be at least one. The Gameboy camera, if you are unaware, is a 0.014MP monochrome camera which produces extremely low resolution funtographs (as Gameboy photographs are known). It also has no IR cut filter, so in effect is full spectrum, resulting in really odd images in sunny conditions. Naturally, I use the Gameboy to produce digital aerochromes, which are colour infrared images that replicate the look of Kodak Aerochrome, a long defunct colour infrared emulsion.

Fourth on the list is an image from our holiday in the Maldives. I took loads of photos in the Maldives, and I've presented some in the Challenge before, but I don't think I'll ever beat this one. I spent an fair bit of time snorkeling, and one day I drifted a little too far, over a bank of coral. I couldn't push myself away — because it was coral — so I let myself drift over the reef, knowing that it would eventually pass. Later, back over sand I headed towards the shore, and caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. It was a shark, about 1½m long. I whipped my underwater action camera around and caught it just as it swam away. I wasn't afraid, I had been assured that these were 'vegetarian sharks'. That's a thing, right?

The final image on my list of favourites was taken way back in December 2004. It's a photograph of my parents that was taken at a pub in Little Malvern, Worcestershire. This was taken when I brought my Better Half to meet my parents for the first time. They had taken us out on a trip to the Malvern Hills, and we treated them to a nice pub lunch. This is a special photograph, and one of my favourites, as a few months later my Dad passed away. I've kept this photo on every mobile phone I've had as the image on their contact form. Sadly, both have passed now, but I keep this image as a constant reminder. 

So these are some of my personal favourites. I'm not going to pretend that they are all wonderful images, but they all mean something special to me. Mind you, if you ask me the same question again next week I'll probably pick some different images as my personal favourites. 

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can po3st their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag 'Lens-Artists'.

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