Website relaunch 2011! Today is the day, and I just about managed to get the new site up in time before the end of 2011 – a deadline I set for myself to build up some pressure.
The idea to re-design my website emerged quite a while ago. In fact, in order to split my website into two parts (one blog-style, one gallery) I even purchased a second internet domain already several years ago. But all the time I never really got around to start working on this task. I won’t give you any excuses here, after all it was just me being plain lazy.

So what is new besides the graphical appearance? First of all, now there are two separate websites: Besides this blog-style website including illustrated descriptions of my travels, there is a new web gallery (SilentCaptures.com, see image on the right). I tried to keep both sites clean and simple with respect to structure and design, with the gallery being even a bit more puristic – as nothing should distract from the images presented there.
Both sites are free of Adobe Flash(TM), hence they generally should work with iPhones and iPads, however, they do require JavaScript. When I tested PhotoScapes.eu on my iPad, I realised some minor glitches though, which I might address in the future.

At this stage, the gallery and the photographic blog hardly have any content. Both will slowly fill up. In particular the travel blog currently only contains the very old account of my walking adventure in Scotland 1997, which I used as sample content when setting up the site. But be patient, my collection of images from Egypt 2006 will follow soon, and so will more recent articles.

A brief history of my websites:

The following three images show a kind of evolution of my website over the last almost 12 years – with the same article (my 1997 travel diary of the West Highland Way in Scotland) as an example. From left to right we can see the site I first set up in the year 2000, followed by the 2006 re-design and last but not least the current newly designed version (click images to enlarge):

• As you can see, in 2000 the website had a very simple appearance, functional, but very basic. Also, everything was plain HTML. A pain to update galleries as nothing was automated and each new album had to be hard-coded. Nevertheless I did add a small new album each time I returned home from travels abroad.
• In 2006, just like today around New Year, I completely re-designed the site. For the first time Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) defined the layout and the whole page was structured by heavy use of PHP-scripting. By then the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor was already there for a decade, but I was apparently rather late with introducing it to my website.
  Looking back now, this 2006 webpage suffered a bit from the overuse of graphical skins, which diverted attention from the actual photographic images presented. Also, it was hand-crafted with no proper database behind it, which made maintenance rather complicated.
• So finally end of 2011 there is another re-launch: The new website is built within the WordPress framework with its obligatory MySQL database. I regard this new site (PhotoScapes.eu) a “photographic travel blog”. Besides this new blog-like website, I set up a new web gallery (SilentCaptures.com) to present outstanding images. This gallery is based on Piwigo, and also serves as the image database behind the WordPress installation.

Pre-historical:

Actually, preceding the websites mentioned above, there was an early site from 1996. However, this early site was more a typical “personal homepage” of the 1990s – when the world wide web was still kind of young, when normal people had no mobile phones yet, not to speak of smart-phones as we know them today, and when there would be no facebook invented for another 8 years or so. In other words, those were the dark days before recorded history and hence I will not go into further detail ;o).

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

The Saalfeld underground mine – better knwon as “Feengrotten” (German for “fairy caves”) – is a small system of artificial tunnels, passages and galleries, which are connected with some natural caves.

Saalfeld is located in the German state of Thuringia, actually just 30 miles from my current home. Today I went to Saalfeld (in good company) for a couple of hours. As you can see from the images captured, it was well worth the visit: The mine is rather small, but it includes some beautiful natural caves and an underground lake. In the right light this lake and its stalagmites and stalactites reflecting in the water give a very nice and colourful sight.

   

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

When scanning through my old images recently, I came across some old photographs of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, taken in December 1999. So this was less than 2 years before the tragedy caused by acts of terrorism in September 2001.
I took these images while on a business trip to the East Coast of the US, visiting Boston and New York City.

Since the Twin Towers are no more and hence these photos can never be re-taken, I thought I should share them – ignoring the fact that there are probably millions of similar photographs on the World Wide Web. All my images were taken on 35mm AGFA slide film.

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

Stretching south from mass-tourism-infested Cancun lies a part of the Yucatán coastline, which is also known as the Riviera Maya. While Cancun is definitely an overcrowded place and on my personal list ranks as one of the top architectural disasters of the Caribbean, the remaining Riviera Maya in most parts is like a totally different world.

We spent the first week in the Yucatán, the business part of the trip, in an all-inclusive resort South of Cancun. While still relatively large, this place fortunately lacks the towering height and ugliness of many hotels further north. Typical birds at the coast are of course the seagull, and the pelican.

As it was just at the end of the rain season, some of the images show signs of upcoming tropical storms.

 

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

Special gems at the Riviera Maya are the beaches in the south. Here you will find the quiet yet beautiful Carribean beach without concrete and if you are lucky you might even have it all for your own.

After the business part of the trip to the Yucatán, the small town of Tulum in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo served as a home base for excursions throughout the peninsula. Hence the images shown here are mostly taken at locations at or just south of the walled Mayan city of Tulum.

 

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

The Yucatán peninsula is known for its rich fauna and flora. A small selection – mainly limited to insects, lizards and trees – is displayed in this set.
Most of the images were taken near Tulum, Coba and at the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve.

   

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

Of all the Mayan cities in the Yucatán, the walled city of Tulum is certainly the one in the most pittoresque setting – built directly at the Caribbean Sea, including sandy beaches and a natural cliff with a once completely stucco-covered and painted palace at the cliff’s edge.
The rather small city, which was still inhabited in the 16th century at the arrival of the Spanish, had its architectural prime between 1200 and 1450, in the so called post-classic era. Inscriptions however prove that the place was already inhabited at least as early as 564 AD.

The ancient Mayan name of Tulum is said to have been “Zama”, or the city of Dawn.

 

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

The Mayan site of Chunyaxche, also known as Muyil, is a Mayan city in southern Quintana Roo. Only “Muyil A” is open to the public. The site probably began to be populated already around 300 BC.
The nearby lagoons of Muyil and Chunyaxche show many traces of Mayan civilization, including a system of canals connecting the lagoons with the open sea.

Unfortunately I did not manage to get a decent shot of the large blue butterflies – some kind of Blue Morpho butterfly I suspect – of which several could be found at the site when I visited.

 

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

Around 30 miles away from Tulum and the Caribbean coast lie the ruins of the ancient Mayan City of Coba, from the middle and late classic period, from 500 to 900 AD. The city stretches over almost 40 square miles around five smaller lagoons. It might have been home to more than 50,000 people.

Among its numerous pyramids, Nohoch Mul, the tallest of them, reaches a height of 140 ft or 42 metres, exceeding “El Castillo” in Cichen Itza. Climbing this steep pyramid to reach the temple building on top is an adventure on its own – but rewarded by a spectacular view over dense rain forest.
Unlike Tulum and Chichen Itza, Coba is still vastly covered by forest, only the major building complexes have been cleared of trees. These complexes are connected by elevated ancient roads.

The site further features two smaller but perfectly preserved ball courts.

 

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau

Spanish colonial times have left their architectural mark on the Yucatán Peninsula. While on this trip I avoided most larger cities, however some nice example of colonial architecture ca be found at the Hacienda Chichen which served as an archaeologists’ base at the time of the great excavations and restorations of the nearby Mayan city of Chichen Itza in the last century. We stayed at the Hacienda for two nights when exploring the Mayan city.
The last few images show some impressions of the colonial town of Valladolid in central Yucatán.

 

PhotoScapes - A Photographic Travel Blog by Alexander Thorsten Blumenau