Colourful World: Burgundy or maroon

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This week Cee’s Fun Foto challenge is Maroon/Burgundy.

In Berlin, there are some trees planted near the Reichstag (parliament building) and also along the river Spree, whose leaves turn amazing shades of red, yellow, orange and pink during autumn. They have a name but I can’t remember it, I heard it for the first time the previous autumn in Berlin. One day after work it was a sunny and mild autumn evening, so I decided on an impromptu bike ride to take a look at them. Here are some photos of the trees which had leaves in a burgundy or maroon shade.

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Colourful World – Apricot and Peach

Alhambra, Spain

Courtyard in Alhambra, Spain

This week Cee chose the colours apricot and peach for her Fun Foto Challenge Colourful World Series. A few weeks ago, I took a photo of summer’s bounty: the bowl of apricots and plums we’d picked on J’s family’s farm in Czech. So I went back to that photo to study the shades of apricot, wondering if I’d taken any other photos that included natural shades of apricot and peach during my stay in Germany. The answer was, not many, apart from some orange-yellow flowers! Apricot and peach are shades of summer, warm colours, and this is more a land of greens and blues. Looking back at my photos, I found that these colours were more common in warmer countries: in the orange sand and rock found in some parts of South Africa and other dry countries, which turns a yellow-orange apricot shade when the sun is setting,  and the peach-coloured stone of the beautifully carved Alhambra in Spain. It has been dry this year in central Europe, and last weekend we did ride past some wheatfields which had turned an almost peach colour in the sun. Actually, a great trick to make a room appear warmer is to paint it in shades of peach or apricot, and I noticed that buildings painted in these colours still look warm in winter or on a rainy day. Here are some of the photos I found with shades of apricot and peach. Continue reading

Colourful World: Turquoise and Teal

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge focuses on Turquoise and Teal this time around.  The shades formed by  the colours blue and green combined are probably my favourite of the colour spectrum. Here are just a couple of photos from a brightly painted bridge near Eberswalder in Germany, a dragonfly at Liepnitzsee (in Brandenburg, north of Berlin), the beautiful green-blue waters of Liepnitzsee itself, and the crystal clear aquamarine waters of the Julian Alps in Slovenia (the colour is apparently caused by glacial powder). Till next time!

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