This city's silver in the moon, and mountains heaped with sugar spoons...

For an interesting change of pace, it appears that Maggie isn't actually writing this blog post. I've heard rumors that you all wanted to see pictures from my (yes, that would make me Niklaas) trip to Europe. She was only going to upload them, but I asked her if I could write a bit about all of these, since every picture always has a story behind it. 

But first...A little background on where I went. For the first week, I traveled up to Northern Sweden, Umeå to be exact, and for the second week, Northern Spain. 

With that out of the way...here are the pictures: 

Alright, so this first one was taken of...you guessed it...a brick building. To be honest, I'm completely unsure as to the significance of this building, but anyways, I'm always trying to keep it fresh, especially when it comes down to something as "static" as a building. More on that in a few.

Number one...

And number two.
These two pictures were my first venture into posed still life pictures, and I ended up being pretty happy with the result overall. In order to soften the light, and get the effect I wanted out of these, I ended up bumping up the ISO to 1600, and putting a white t-shirt over my ghetto strobe flash. I think the graininess, added to the really soft focus and even softer light, makes these infinitely more interesting.

Oh my goodness. This is absolutely my favorite picture from the trip. This one was taken in the Stockholm airport while we were waiting for a long, long time, for our flight to Barcelona. The sheer number of patterns in this picture, and the fact that they don't really detract from one another makes this picture.
So after airporting it up, we finally ended up in Barcelona. I'm still pretty much in awe of the city. Although we didn't have much time to spend in the city, since the real reason for the trip was work, what I managed to see, effectively blew my mind.

Side note: Like Castanets by Bishop Allen completely sums up how I feel about Barcelona

This restaurant was amazing. I always feel so weird taking pictures inside restaurants, but for this one, it absolutely had to happen. Although you can't see much of the decor, the whole thing was decorated in a kind of euro-american chic way. The picture would've been better, I suppose, if I had used a flash, since the whole place was insanely dim, so the shutter speed on this is huge...1/8s, and I didn't have a tripod, so I had to make do with the table top. Anyways--best part of the restaurant? Regina Spektor. Walking into a restaurant and hearing Fidelity playing is one of the greatest things ever (Well, and the food, of course).

So this was the view out of my hotel.


the click and clatter of my feet on the lonely crooked cobbled streets...like castanets. 

The building on the left is an apartment complex, same with the one that I'm in, but I have no idea what that one in the background is. Oh well.

This is another one of my very favorite pictures from the trip...
This one was taken on the train ride from Barcelona to Valencia, and I'm a huge fan. The ways that the lines on the table take one's eyes up to the soft focus reflection in the window are amazing. And, in my opinion, completely expresses the feeling of traveling by train at night.

Alright, this is the last one! This one was taken out the window of the house we stayed at in Valencia. In all of these pictures, I tried to focus on the patterns (especially in architecture) and usually, I suppose, I mostly succeeded.

The end.

Niklaas

P.S. I'm (maggie) going to be reading these comments, but I'm going to show them to Niklaas too ;)!!
P.P.S. And yes! This means he is home, so I'm a happy camper! I'll blog later this week. We had a photoshoot:)
P.P.P.S. I just made a twitter! Add me :) maggeygrace