The second of our black and white pictures

Last Monday I shared more about the first of these photos which now hang framed on our bedroom wall, today I’m revisiting another holiday memory and strangely also from 2014.

It was also a place we were revisiting, but somewhere we’d first visited together in the autumn of 2012. We’d booked a walking holiday on one of the new holiday’s offered as the Rota Vincentina in Alentejo had only recently opened. We weren’t really sure what to expect, but a week away in the relative warmth of Portugal’s sun in mid-October sounded like a good plan. And it was, we had a great holiday in 2012 and fell in love with the region as a whole, and actually with Portugal too.

We vowed to come back, and two years later we did just that. This time our visit was in June, rather than October and instead of walking between hotels we hired a car and based ourselves at the mid-point of the route from that original trip, using that as our base to revisit many of the places we’d visited before, and even retracing our steps along some of the coastal path.

We’d seen some storks near to our hotel on our first trip and we were mesmerised and amazed, and a little bit scared of walking too close! On our second trip we weren’t expecting to see such a fantastic sight as we drove back along a quiet road to our hotel. So we pulled over and had our own personal photo shoot with the, what I imagine, are the proud parents.

Again the photo is great in colour, and it’s full of warmth from the sun but somehow in black and white the main subjects stand out even more.

Portugal is such a beautiful place, and we’ve been back to visit other parts of the country - including Lisbon, Porto and the Douro valley - many times since, but the Alentejo region holds a special place in my heart, and I suspect it’s about time we made another visit there.

But in the meantime we have a second great holiday memory right there on the wall as part of our series of four black and white pictures, and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

The first of our black and white pictures

I can’t believe that I shared our four black and white pictures last June, I’ve no idea where the time has gone - but back then I planned to share more about why we chose the pictures we did, so finally here’s the first in that series.

It seems right to start with the rock formation in Cornwall, a picture I snapped on our holiday back in 2014, which despite being almost eleven years ago remains vivid in my memories, or most of it does, I think!

We had an AirBnB in Newquay which turned out to be in an ideal spot, and in the week we were there we certainly packed things in visiting some great gardens including Bosvigo gardens and the Lost Gardens of Heligan, and some pretty towns such as St Mawes and Tintagel. We visited National Trust properties - Lanyhydrock is a stand out memory, and the castle at Tintagel managed by English Heritage.

As well as the sunsets from our apartment we enjoyed natural spots such as Carnewas and of course Rough Tor and Brown Willy Tor where this photo was taken. And while I’ve shared a lot of those places here, there’s some that I never got around to - let’s be honest after eleven years, I’m unlikely to now aren’t I? Though never say never as if we revisit these places it’d be interesting to do a compare and contrast - but please, don’t hold your breath.

Brown Willy has always raised a smile here, for its schoolboy humorous name and also because it was a regular place to visit during MOH’s childhood family holidays. It’s a hill in Cornwall and is the highest point in Bodmin Moor. It was great to revisit one of MOH’s childhood memories with him, though if I’m honest I was much more interested in the rock formations and the rugged natural beauty!

The surroundings were great in colour, but actually I think they’re much more powerful and dramatic in black and white.

And it definitely looks even better framed, and on the wall in our new house as part of our series of four black and white pictures.

Four black and white pictures

I’d been at a loss for some artwork for our bedroom wall. We had one picture on the wall in our previous house, and that wasn’t right for here so I needed to come up with something else. And I really wasn’t sure.

In the end I took inspiration from an existing picture we had - remember back in March 2020 I shared a photo of mine that finally got on the wall with some help from Photowall?

But I wasn’t sure if where I had in mind would work, so I mocked it up.

And so for the next few weeks or so, I tweaked their positions - up a bit, down a bit, together a bit more and so on. Finally I was happy and then my attention turned to choosing the images.

We had the rocks from our holiday in Cornwall back in 2014, and I knew I had a picture of storks nesting from a holiday in Portugal. But what else? The good news is I found some.

And I used Photowall again, this time paying for my additional three images to be framed.

The service was still good, and it was easy to upload my images and create my artwork, though I hadn’t realised that they’d changed their frames so the three new frames are a slightly different finish to the one I already had. I was disappointed that the frames and pictures came separately though, and I had to assemble them myself once they arrived - not a huge thing, but a definite difference to my previous experience.

That said, I’m still very happy with the end result. Of course when they arrived I spent more than intended on their layout - thankfully for MOH on the carpet rather than the wall (as there was also a difference in the positioning of the sawtooth picture hanger).

I decided on this layout.

And don’t they look great on the wall?

MOH did a great job, under extreme pressure to get the gaps right!!

And as you’re wondering what the images are, they’re (clockwise from top left):

• A view towards Greenwich from the Thames Path

• Storks nesting on telegraph poles in the Alentejo in Portugal

• A flooded field in Elston, one of the villages close to our new home

• A rock formation from our trip to Cornwall back in 2014.

And all are photos we’ve taken ourselves, and there’s nothing better to have on our walls - our memories captured by us - at some point I’ll do a post about each of the four photos we chose and why.