Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Textural contrasts

Some of my youngest English group putting together 3-letter words and pictures, racing the other half of the class

Partially snow-covered cave on the bank of the river

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

View down to Chazhashi and Murqmeli hamlets from the main church of the former

Icicles from the roof of the same church

Snow doing its thing, persuaded by wind and sun

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

More from Feb. 12's busy shooting.

Old snow - so much more interesting after the wind and sun have got hold of it for a few days

Queen Tamar's Summer (upper left) and Winter Tower complexes (right) and some more nicely windswept old snow

View down the village from the entrance way of the church at Chazhashi hamlet

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

All in a day's work, February 12 in this case.

This scene, all too familiar to me as a resident of Ushguli, needs something new and dramatic to complete it.  Is Shkhara, Georgia's highest mountain, visible? (Below the main cloud at left.  Lamaria, at right, only looks bigger because it's much closer; Shkhara is 7 km  (c. 5 miles) away in the distance, air clear as a bell.)  Does the sky have something interesting about it?  (Cloud in the perfect position.)  We know that those are houses; but how about a person walking through the scene to give perfect scale to everything?  (There she is, one of my colleagues at the school, bottom right.)  Right place, right time, take the shot!

Me after a hard slog through snow up to mid-thigh deep, all for photos' sake

Abstract snowscape

Cracked paint, chaos obeying rules

Etseri, late Jan-early Feb. 2008

It's about time!

Yes indeed, it's taken me a long time to get back online for long enough to post some more images to the old blog. Here are some from Etseri, as promised. Bottom to top:

Sergo's little helper on the hay-round

A local friend after an hour's walk through a showfall

Shorts of wood

Etseri winter scenery

Valya the Valiant, Etseri and region's unsung heroine, medicine woman, on her rounds. The intravenous drip, hanging from a clothes-horse (is that what you call it?) saved the man's life: he was severely dehydrated after the runs, and we rode on horseback 2 hours to reach him.

The shortest watchtower in Svaneti, near Pari, and only a few km from the tallest, which is in Etseri and on this blog already.

... So I went down to the village of Etseri at the end of January for the funeral of a lady I'd known there. She was 85 and had been bedridden for more than 10 years, with 3 unmarried children looking after her. I expected to be away a week, but my free ride back up to Ushguli took over 2 weeks. Thus the delay in new posts to the blog...

Here are some pictures from just before I left for Etseri, to be followed soon by some from Etseri itself.

Bottom - General shot of Ushguli with cool clouds over Mt Shkhara.

Snow has TEXTURE! (Well, especially if it's old.)

Snow has FORM! (Well, if the things under it do.)

Top - Tony on Skis! I went down one slope in deep powder, once, and fell over halfway down. But it's a start.

Winter, Ladreri, March 2007

Several more which didn't qualify as haiku but are favourites nonetheless.

Bottom, fences.
Middle, the barn roof's edge.
Next up, entrance to ANOTHER ruined house.
Above, leaves slowly melting their way down by virtue of their darkness attracting slightly more of the sun's heat than the snow around them.

Worth a Haiku...?

The old saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Yes, but what if a thousand words are much too much?

Haiku is a Japanese form of poem which uses only three lines, in the form of 5-7-5 syllables. Very tight and restricted, but so... Japanese in its approach, so minimal and clean and to the point, like most of Japanese art. (See an article on haiku in English at www.ahapoetry.com/keirule.htm if you're seriously interested in the form.)

Here are some photographs from March 2007 in Svaneti, black and white, each of which I consider to be worth "only" a haiku. But this doesn't mean that they're worth less than thousand-word pictures! Just that I compare them to my ordinary, often dense colour photographs as a haiku to a thousand words.

Now I've said enough.