Phone-tography

Happy New Year everyone! Yes… it’s true… this is my FIRST blog post of 2013!

Well my friend Sherese has decided to come visit me here in Medellín for the month of February. We have had a lot of fun together getting to reconnect again. When coming down for the trip I told her to leave her PC and SLR Camera back in the States and that she could use mine while she was here. Instead, she has decided to take on a new task of seeing things from a new prospective by taking all of her photos with her cell phone which can be quite frustrating for a photographer – no zoom (well no REAL zoom)! However, it has been a great challenge for her and she has gotten me to take my phone out a bit and take some photos as well.

Make sure to check out Sherese’s blog – Life Defused. This blog post is about her own phone-tography as we took a 5 hour walking tour of Envigado (southern suburb of Medellín). Check out her other posts in order to inspire yourself!

Here is a look at our walk around the city via my cell phone lens. All photos taken with my Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket and edited with the Snapseed app.

Weekend Getaways: La Pintada, Colombia

Every few weekends my girlfriend, some friends, and I get away from the city life. The greatest part about Medellin is that nearly every weekend you can drive into the mountains and enjoy the little towns nearby the city. There are an unbelievable amount of towns that lie within just a few hours of Medellin. One weekend we stayed at a friends “cabana” in La Pintada just a few hours south of Medellin. Here is a quick look at part of our trip.

Santa Fe de Antioquia

Last weekend I took a little side trip out to Santa Fe de Antioquia with the 4 Musketeers (the name that we have given to our little clan which includes myself, my girlfriend and another couple. We have become great friends seeing how we all met together in the same dance academy).

This town is about an hour Northwest of Medellin, Colombia which still has the old colonial feel with the cobblestone roads. Here are a few photos from our weekend get-a-way.

Scotland 2008!

So I have decided to go back and post some of my photos from Europe. Today I posted some new photos from Edinburgh & Glasgow, Scotland. I spend 2 days between the cities with two of my friends and captured a few shots while I was there. Here is a preview to check out!

Brussels 2009!!

Back in March 2009 I took a trip with a few friends to Amsterdam for one week. During that time my friends, Erik Neuwirth, Stephanie Bowen and I took a side trip over to Brussels, Belgium for  a few days. It was the perfect mini trip! Here are a couple quick shots from our short time there.

Uruguay

Day 21-23.

Viernes – Domigo (Fri – Sun). Oct 3-5, 2009.

This weekend I traveled to 2 different cities in Uruguay. The cities were about 2 hours apart from each other by bus but were completely different.

A group of 10 of us from the school took a ferry ride from Bs. As. over to Colonia, Uruguay.  We went out to lunch as soon as we got there and noticed that the service from the restuarnts were catered around toursits. They were extremely friendly and even willing to split the bill for us. While sitting outside we heard a car coming from down the street with extremely loud music. When the car passed we realized it had a massive speaker litterally mounted on top of the car for everyone to hear their music. I thought we were bad without loud music in the States but this was just unbelievable. It turns out that it is extremly common in the city thought. Throughout the visit we saw/heard about 10 cars with the same set up. The city however, was absolutely beautiful. It is a preserved like an old town and the residents are not allowed to change the front of their building in order to keep this preserved look. The entire town was very quiet and peaceful. It was a wonderful escape from the busy, bustling city of Bs. As. I noticed on the second day that every car yielding to any pedestrian and the cars never went over 20 mph or so. On top of that, there is not a single traffic light in the entire town. Talk about a laid back town!

On the 2nd day we jumped on a bus and rode over to the capitol in Montevideo. We arrived in the late afternoon and walked out to the park to see a parade going on. After the parade we walked for about an hour down the beach in to the sunset. It was beautiful and there were people everywhere. We ended up in the Old Town Center where we found a very posh restaurant for dinner. We all enjoyed an amazing dinner with some of the best food I have eaten so far in South America. We got tipsy off of a few bottles of red wine and then headed out to the bar for the night. We ended up arriving very early in the night (in regards to South American time standards) and there was not a single person in the bar.  To make up for this we all bought drinks and stood in a circle entertaining ourselves with some interesting dancing. Since the group consisted of people from about 5 different countries, we each represented our countries by showing off our dances from our respective countries. The bar owners were so amused with us that they decided to give us free drinks all night. The streets finally got croweded around 1am and so then we headed next door to the dance club. After dancing for hours we came home around 5am only to realize the next morning that it was Daylight Savings that night…so really we came home at 6am. Being extremly tired from the night before we ended up just sitting on the beach all day then we headed over to the port to catch our ferry ride back to Argentina.

Overall, the country was a very nice break from Argentina. The people are very nice and the exchange rate is ridiculous. $1USD = $22.5 pesos which made it fun trying to keep track of how much we were spending!