In 2009 I went on a holiday to England and Wales with my wife. We hired a car from Heathrow Airport, and began our trip by driving directly away from London. The plan was to do a loop through Cornwall, up to Wales, then across and down to London via the Cotswolds. We hadn’t booked any accommodation in advance except for after we got to London, and we spent two weeks driving to wherever took our fancy and finding a place to stay for the night.

After several days we ended up in Shrewsbury, just on the English side of the border with Wales. It’s a lovely city, with the famous Shrewsbury Abbey just across the river and outside the walls of the old medieval city. We liked it so much we stayed thee two nights, giving us time to spend an entire day walking around and absorbing the architecture and atmosphere. The weather was intermittently drizzly, and at one point in the early afternoon the rain got quite heavy. We took refuge in a cafe which served gelato, and spent half an hour or so sitting and eating the sweet treat.

While sitting, I watched the people walking past outside. As this couple waked by, sharing an umbrella, I grabbed my camera and took this candid shot. I have no idea who these people are, but this is one of my favourite photos from that trip, as I feel it captures something about the couple, and the way they quietly work together to withstand the British drizzle. Whoever these two are, I hope they are still happy together.

I took this photo in Venice, on my first trip to Italy in 2001.

Venice is an amazing place. Sure, it’s hyped up, but for me it lived up to the hype and then some. It is pedestrian-oriented and there is something amazing and interesting around every corner of the maze-like warren of streets and canals. It buzzes with activity, but even though many of the people you see are tourists, there is a definite local atmosphere if you just head a few steps off the main tourist strips. Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square) is of course as far on the tourist strip as it’s possible to get, but this also makes it a colourful and fascinating place. It gleams at night with lights and people and sounds – it’s something to just immerse yourself in.

I took my Canon T70 35mm film camera on this trip, with a small selection of lenses and a cheap aluminium tripod. I am very glad I took the tripod, because I took quite a few shots at night, requiring slow shutter speeds – this being one of them. Being film, I had to estimate the exposure with a bit of help from the camera’s light meter and then hope that the pictures turned out okay when I got home and had them developed.

I set up behind the tables at this cafe, aiming at Basilica San Marco on the right, and the opera singer with small group of musicians on the cafe stage at left. The photo turned out better than I hoped. I like the blur of the moving people in the square, which adds some of that atmosphere of activity which you feel when really there.

I scanned the digital image from a print of the negative. This is one of my most viewed photos online. A while back I was contacted by the Victorian Department of Education (from the Australian state of Victoria), who requested permission to reproduce this photo in an exam paper. Since it was for educational purposes, I granted them permission, and they sent me a copy of the paper. It appeared in a geography paper, with questions about the use of land and buildings in this area.

This is not actually my favourite photo from that trip to Italy. Maybe I’ll tell the story of that one another day.

Since I started talking about individual photos with my latest photo, I thought for the second one I’d go to the other extreme in one sense, and show the first photo I uploaded to Flickr:

I took this photo in January 2006, just a few hours after landing in Tokyo on my first visit to Japan. This was my first business trip with Canon Information Systems Research Australia, the company I’ve been working for ever since. Being a subsidiary of Canon, we have plenty of contact with the head office in Tokyo, and staff often take business trips over there.

I was travelling with a co-worker (that’s him blurred on the right, holding the spoon) who had been to Tokyo before, so could rely on his experience in getting around, and in finding a place to eat on the night we arrived. Being January, it was very cold – much colder than I am used to even in midwinter at home. There was snow on the ground. We caught a shuttle bus from Narita Airport to Shinagawa, where our hotel was. After checking in, we were hungry and so ventured out to find a place to eat.

My companion spotted a random ramen restaurant not far from the hotel and we managed to squeeze into some seats at the bar counter you can see here. The meal was hot and delicious, freshly made by the cooks behind the counter. I took this photo with a compact IXUS30 camera, which was the first really decent quality digital camera I owned. (I actually bought it for my wife before I started working for Canon.)

I like the perspective lines in this photo, and the balance between blue and red light across the two halves of the image. The slight tilt and the blurring of the motion of some of the people give it a sense of motion and busy-ness which matches my impressions of that meal. That, and memories of the hustle and bustle on this first night in Tokyo make this one of my favourite photos from that short trip.