My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
During the recent trip to Milan, I had a chance to take some photos of the people working on the cathedral. Since my research is related to acoustics, I was particularly interested in the work of acousticians, who were sampling the sound of the organ by moving the microphone to various locations in the nave and recording several repeating notes and musical fragments.
I think the reason why photographs remain popular even though video conveys more information is that the time commitment associated with video is much larger than that of photography. This applies to all aspects, starting from production, where editing takes an enormous amount of time from a photographer’s perspective (in my experience, and I have heard others confirm it, the rule of thumb is one hour of editing for every minute of video for short clips.) The content consumption stage, i.e. watching a video, also requires more time that watching a photo. A photo can be hung on a wall and enjoyed every time our eye falls upon it, while a piece of video mush be viewed in its entirety to be appreciated.
In Japan, travel agencies promote pre-packaged trips, where everything, including every single meal are pre-determined. This level of planning, where travelers have zero choice once they have subscribed to the trip is probably unique to Japan, but there is some logic to it, as having too much choice results in wasted mental and emotional energy and, consequently, lost opportunity to actually experience the trip (the philosophical paradox of the Buridan’s Ass is an extreme example of this).
When I climbed to the roof of the Duomo do Milano and looked through the layers of intricate gothic stone carvings at the streets below, all I could think was that it looked like lace. I had a similar impression of the Doge’s Palace in Venice and, most recently, of the Alhambra Palace in Granada. 
In contrast, the carvings in Alhambra did not look particularly dynamic. Instead, repeating patterns lead the eye to infinity, which, in fact, is one of the techniques of the muslim art that conveys the infinity of the universe. For close-ups of these patters, I used a telephoto lens to visually compress the perspective.
Certainly, having water in some form as part of the image adds some an aspect of interest to the photo. This is a well-known fact in landscape photography, but I recently came across a surface-tension-related subject on a street in Amsterdam – two street performers creating giant soap bubbles using a rope dipped in soap water. Incidentally, I found that I could temporally resolve burst of the bubble using a 10 frames per second burst of my Canon EOS-1D X
We visited the palace-fortress-gardens complex of Alhambra in Granada in 45-degree (C) weather with our three-year-old daughter and with no particular plan for photography. I wanted to try to capture our subjective impression of the sizzling heat through close-up portraits, but I also wanted to take some descriptive photos of this famous tourist attraction. The place is so overwhelmingly beautiful, with its lace of stone carvings and bubbling fountains, that I quickly ran out of creative ideas of what to photograph besides the cliche shots of people posing in front of the pools receding into the background, framed by orange trees. 
Timing of delivery is tremendously important in photography. This is obvious in such genres as reportage, event coverage, etc., but even in less obvious genres like travel and family photography I constantly find that sharing the photos immediately, or at least shortly after taking them, makes them more valuable in terms of the emotional impact.
Street artists were hard at work at Plaza Balcón de Europa in Nerja (Spain) every night during our stay there. Their popularity among tourists obviously varied. The cartoonist who drew funny caricatures of models was, by far, the most popular artist. His skill was great, both in observation of the distinguishing features of his clients and in the drawing technique itself.
This time, observing the cartoonist, I was wondering how this artist was able to maintain his motivation to set up shop on the daily basis. Perhaps, the difference in the production processes between his “analog” drawing and digital photography is the key. Even though he worked very fast, he still spent considerable time on small details (which is the most fun, in my personal experience) and on what would be referred to in photography as “post-processing” – adjusting and manipulating the image that he had captured in his mind. Maybe, the way to stay motivated and to have fun with photography is to allow sufficient time to think about and work on individual images – something that is easy to lose in the digital workflow. 
I find that our perception of air temperature is not only subjective, but also relative, i.e. it depends on what we experienced recently. My recent trip to Europe was unusually long and included stays in Italy, Russia, Netherlands, so I had an opportunity to compare summer weather in these countries. Genoa in May seemed very hot. There were a couple of days when people flocked to the beach in the neighbouring Boccadasse, a Chinque Terre-like idyllic town, and the purple-coloured fountain in the middle Genoa looked like an oasis in the hot maze of the narrow streets. 
Eighteen degrees (Celsius) in Amsterdam felt cold after hot and humid Voronezh, and it set a stage for the 45-degree heat of Madrid to be almost shocking. The good news about Spanish heat is that the humidity is low, which makes it tolerable. Also, further South, in Nerja, the temperature was much more comfortable 35 degrees, and the breeze from the sea made for exceptionally nice warm evenings – something that I miss in Victoria.
Perhaps, it would make an interesting project to try to show different kinds of weather, from nice to nasty to dangerous in a single series of photos.
Rick Steves
In terms of photography, I tried to change the style of my landscape and street photos a bit, by focussing not so much on the composition, but specifically on patterns of light and colour. Using an analogy with painting and drawing, I wanted my images to be more like sketches that capture the impression of the scene, rather than studies of the subjects. My intend was to take care of the composition in post-processing. Hopefully, these visual patterns will become a sort of bookmarks for more detailed memories. Otherwise, the amount of new information that we are exposed during any trip (if we are paying attention to it, which itself cannot be taken for granted) is so tremendous that keeping it all at the same level of memory, with direct access to every tiny detail, is simply impossible.
