Taking pictures

Today I am going to tell you how I take pictures in Lisbon. At the moment I still have time for this because the semester at the technical university starts on the 19th of February.

I start by planning where do I want to go while still in the apartment, because I don’t have Internet on my phone yet. After I leave home I put my mind to go by the route. Five minutes later I see a house with a tile facade lit by the sun and get totally carried away.

I deviate from the route a little bit (a little bit, sure) to go up the street and take couple of pictures of other tiled houses. An indefinite period of time later I examine the off-line map to understand where the hell am I at all. I use openstreetmap, it works quite well in Austria, but in Portugal the points of interest (cafés, shops) and house numbers are not that accurate, I guess because it seems that in Portugal they prefer commercial companies like Google to open-source. By the way, there are surveillance cameras everywhere here, it is quite creepy.

It is unbelievable easy to distract my attention as soon as I have a camera in the hand. I like visually appealing, elegantly or extraordinary dressed people with memorable faces. Sometimes when I get specially euphoric I want to actually tell those people how good-looking they are. I never do, my mom told me to not to talk to strangers. So if you ever see me silently staring at you don’t be scared, probably you are just beautiful.

I enjoy high-quality murals, it is always a pleasant surprise to unexpectedly find an ephemeral masterpiece in the middle of nowhere.

I like to study the sculptures, folds of material and lively faces carved out of stone fascinate me. I pay much attention to detail. For example, how many people do notice that there is an elephant on the right side of the King José I monument in the Commerce Square?