Capture the Color and Watch Other People Win Prizes

TravelSupermarket.com’s annual Capture the Color contest is back, which is a great opportunity for me to watch other bloggers with much nicer photos than mine win some prizes. I actually wasn’t going to bother entering at all, mainly due to laziness, but when Corrinne from Reflections Enroute nominated me, I resolved to go out and shoot five photos specifically for the contest. That never happened, but I did end up digging through my old images and coming up with five that more or less fit into the color categories.

 

 Yellow

I was walking around the downtown area of Panaji, the capital of the Indian state of Goa, when the doorway to the Casa Lorenza bar caught my eye. With its relatively fresh coat of yellow paint and the newly added advertisements, it stood in stark contrast to the filthy and rundown building surrounding it.

 

Red

I was heading from Thamel to Durbar Square in Kathmandu, Nepal, when I spotted this little temple with several birds circling above. I snapped a few shots and got lucky, catching this bird with its wings spread in the perfect spot to balance the photo.

 

Green

In order to avoid the crowds and the high entrance fees to the Mingsha sand dune in Dunhuang, Gansu province, China, I ended up having to walk over five kilometers to get around the fence and past the guards, but it was worth it. I had the dunes entirely to myself and once I passed this last little shrub, I was surrounded by nothing but sand. Read the full story here: Dunhuang – Playing in China’s Sandbox

 

White

Getting this shot in the Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve in China’s Sichuan province took some convincing. The park was about to close and a security guard was blocking access to the walkway I needed and pointing people in the direction of the buses. I asked him if I could have a few minutes on the walkway to take a photo, but he didn’t understand why I couldn’t just snap it from where I was standing. After a bunch of bad Chinese and even more hand signals, I finally got him to accept that I needed to be in this specific spot.

I took a few minutes to set up my tripod and adjust the settings to allow for the slowest shutter speed possible given the lighting, while the guard fired annoyed looks in my direction. I was sure he would lose patience and order me out of there, but he let me finish despite his obvious misgivings. When I finally packed up and headed toward the buses, he was visibly relieved and I realized he had merely been nervous I might be using photography as an excuse to get past him and take off down the forbidden walkway. You can read about the day I spent being shoved around walkways and poked by umbrellas at Jiuzhaigou here: Keeping Up With the Changs at Jiuzhaigou

 

Blue

The Molecule Man statue in Berlin, Germany stands in the middle of the Spree River where it used to form the border between East and West. On this day, the river was partially frozen and so was I. Read the full story: Winter Photos of Berlin and the Hell I Endured to Get Them

 

Now that I’ve got my post up, there’s nothing left to do but wait for the contest deadline to end and the prizes to come rolling in. True, there’s the small matter of hundreds of other bloggers, many of whom take nicer photos than I, but who has time to worry about little details like that when they’re busy dreaming of ways to spend their prize money.