Capture The Colour!

When Sophie from Propellernet got in touch recently, regarding a fantastic blogger competition that Travelsupermarket.com is currently running, offering the winner £2000 to spend on travel and the five runners up an iPad each I was immediately hooked. Not only by the chance to win one of these great prizes, but also because it gave me a chance to look back at my old holiday photos and remember fondly the places I’ve been to.  I’m currently looking for a destination for my next holiday so looking back at old photos has definitely inspired me to get moving on booking my next one.

The theme of the competition is ‘Capture The Colour’ and the organisers want bloggers to publish up to 5 photos that, (excuse the repetition)… capture the colour!

They specifically want pictures that capture the colours; Blue, Green, Yellow, White and Red.

My initial thought was ‘that’ll be easy’ as I do love to take a colourful photo – but as I began looking back at my treasured pictures I had a bit of a realisation. I don’t just like photos with a colour in them; I like photos that capture a rainbow of colours. So finding pictures where one single colour was the focus was actually quite difficult!

The most difficult for me was ‘white’, but the image I’ve chosen to represent this is one that really reminds me of a fantastic winter short break we had earlier this year.

 

This photo was taken when we visited friends. They live quite close to us but, as is often the case, we don’t spend enough time with them. So this image of a very snowy canal reminds me of the fun we had when we got together for a long weekend.

I took the picture from a bridge overlooking the canal. To the right of me was a slope which is usually grassy but on this particular day was covered in snow like the rest of the landscape.

We had taken a sledge with us and spent a few hours having a huge amount of fun sledging down the slope then hauling ourselves (and the sledge) back up again. 

One of my funniest memories of the day is of the men in the party forming a human wall to ensure that we didn’t carry on at the bottom of the slope and end up half way across a frozen canal!

Every single one of us had a go on the sledge. Imagine the squeals and laughter – not just from the children! The adults reverted to children for the day and were having just as much fun as the youngsters. 

Our fun didn’t end with sledging – oh no! There were snowball fights, snowmen building contests and lots of lying in the snow making snow angels.I really love this picture because the snow makes the area look so pristine and untouched – I can assure you that by the time we left, the area no longer looks quite so pretty! 

I imagined that yellow would be an easy colour to show but actually most of the pictures that I thought would have captured this turned out to be more orange than yellow. I did recently go to see The Wizard of Oz in London, and obviously if I’d known about this competition at the time I could have ‘captured’ the yellow brick road. But as I didn’t, this is my yellow offering.

In the blink of an eye - or perhaps that should be the click of a camera shutter, I've moved from snowy winter days in the UK to sunny memories of our trip to Antigua to represent the colour yellow.

When we visited Antigua we stayed in an area called Jolly Beach and one of the fabulous day trips we enjoyed was a round island trip on a catamaran. I love this photo of the sail filled with the sea breeze. It is such a simple shot of just one aspect of the ‘cat’ but it so obviously represents sunny, holiday sailing trips.

Looking at this photo I remember the feeling of the sun on my skin, the wind in my hair and the gorgeous Antiguan people who made our holiday, and specifically this day trip, so special. This was another day of laughter and acting like children. The catamaran visited gorgeous little bays where we were able to jump from the cat into the clearest blue water I’ve even seen. This was the first time I had ever ‘snorkelled’ and I loved it.

I could actually have chosen pictures from the same day to represent the blue sea, the yellow fish or my incredibly red shoulders at the end of the day because my factor 50 sun cream couldn’t cope with the combination of such hot sun and so many dips in the water! So, speaking of other colours, let’s stay in Antigua and present my image for the colour blue.

 

This is one of my favourite holiday images ever! It was taken on Jolly Beach, Antigua and is now replicated on canvas, mugs, calendars and just about anything else that I can get an image printed onto!

I really don’t think that the picture does justice to the shades of blue that the sea and sky in Antigua have to offer. The colours there seem sharper, clearer and just ‘more’ than they do anywhere else in the world. 

I really wish my photography skills could show the gorgeous array of blues – but although they may not be fully captured on the photo, they are captured forever in my memory!

I have a fondly held wish to travel the world and visit countries that start with every letter, in alphabetical order. I’m making good progress on my A-Z tour, but for this blog I seem to be stuck in the letter A because my next offering comes not from Antigua but from Australia!

We arrived in Australia on their national day, 26^th January a couple of years ago and were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm for celebrating Australia Day. It would have been churlish of us not to join in – so putting our 24 hour flight firmly out of mind, we joined the throng of tens of thousands of people heading to the Swan River in Perth to watch the amazing firework display.

I could have used this display to show any of the colours required for this blog post, but I’ve chosen to use it to show red.

 Red is obviously the colour of passion and fire so using fireworks to capture this colour seems only right.

This amazing display lasted for over 30 minutes with fireworks of all colours being released from a barge in the centre of the river. As these fireworks drew to a close, others were released from the top of the surrounding tall buildings.

I loved the atmosphere and obviously was completely in awe of the display. My previous experiences of watching fireworks were always in a UK winter so the warmth of the evening certainly added to my enjoyment.

For a while when we were in Australia I thought the locals were going to greet us with fireworks everywhere we went. On our arrival in Perth there was this amazing display for Australia Day. When we moved onto Sydney it was Chinese New Year and we were greeted with another gorgeous display to celebrate that.

Sadly, as we moved out to the Barrier Reef we weren’t greeted with a display, although the fireworks did still manage to play a part. 

As we passed through the tiny Hamilton Island Airport we were randomly scanned and my bag was found to have traces of TNT! I was so scared when the security team said they needed to scan all the contents separately to identify the source and that they needed to get a clear scan before they could let me go.

Part of me wanted to do the old joke about how I was just ‘dynamite’ but the sensible part of me realised that this probably wouldn’t be an appropriate comment to make unless I was willing to be subjected to a very personal search!

Eventually the security guard agreed that the ‘TNT’ was possibly because of the number of firework displays we had seen in the past few days, and as they eventually did get a clean ‘sweep’ of me and my bag I was enormously relieved to be allowed through!

My fifth and final photo also comes from Australia. I know it sounds a little strange, but to demonstrate green I've chosen a gogeous shot of the Blue Mountains! 

 I'm so proud of this beautiful picture as it looks like a professional shot, but actually it was taken by my friend Colin, who clearly has a much steadier hand and sharper eye with a camera than I do! 

I absolutely love this photo because it perfectly captures the sense of peace and tranquility in the Blue Mountains. The only sound was of the falling water, the air was so pure it made me feel quite 'heady' and needless to say, the company of friends was brilliant.

I seem to have spent as much of this blog post talking about friends and having fun with them, as I have spent talking about the colours I’ve captured. I suppose that’s the glory of capturing pictures wherever we go. It’s not so much about the actual picture as about the memories it brings back. Boy do I have some great memories!

I’m hoping that this blog post will inspire a few other entries to the ‘Capture The Colour’ competition because I love looking at other peoples photos and hearing about their memories too. So I’m going to prompt a few of the bloggers I love to enter too. 

Some of the bloggers I know who particularly love a competition (although usually hosting rather than entering, but we shall see) are:

 Given to Distracting Others

Trials and Tribulations of a Brummie Mummy

Madhouse Family Reviews

Mummy lion

Multiple Mummy

If you’d like to know more about the Capture the Colour competition, check out all the details here: Capture the Colour Competition