Nowadays, almost all tourists carry digital cameras, and a huge number of people take selfies as they travel. I often have fun taking sneaky photos of people photographing themselves, and I find it ironic that while the purpose of taking selfies is obviously to communicate with others (to share them of social media, etc.), people ask others to take their photo for them more and more rarely – the selfie mindset replaces this form of communication.
So selfies are not so bad in principle. Perhaps, the premise of taking a selfie is also useful when you want to take a sneaky shot of someone or something else. In “Ronin
The location of the castle in the middle of a modern metropolis is in sharp contrast to the deep moats, surrounding its high walls, the original purpose of which was clear – warfare. A man was throwing frisbee to his dog in the grass-covered moat, and I could not make up my mind what was more out-of-place – this peaceful scene or the stone cannonballs piled up in the moats. I think it’s the former; the calm of a modern city life and seemed like a superficial patina on the tough nature of the place.
Richard Feynman, in his autobiographical “
Amazing thing about Gothic cathedrals is that they take enormous amounts of time to construct and require restoration immediately after being built. The amount of detail in their 
Also, paradoxically, a good photo can potentially engage the viewer more than a video would precisely because a photo contains less information (there is no sound, no physical movement, etc.) Therefore, the viewer has to rely on his/her own experience and imagination to fill in what is missing in a photo: e. g. how fast is the sprinter running? How strong is the wind? How hot is the weather? Perhaps, a good photo is a kind of collaboration between the photographer and the audience, and that is why it can be both produced and enjoyed with a limited time commitment from either side. 
Personally, I prefer when some travel plans are set in advance (the planning process itself is an important and exciting part of the trip), but some details are left to be finalized on the spot (this certainly applies to the menu choices of each meal). The balance between giving only few prescribed options and allowing some freedom to customize the experience is tricky. In a sense, it is like selecting a watch face of an apple watch: you have many options to play with, but not enough to paralyze you with indecision. 
What distinguishes the gothic cathedral for me is that it looks like its elements are flying upward, as if in an explosion of vertical lines and tiny details. I tried to show this by using a wide lens (
, which distorts the image in favour of keeping the straight lines straight).
One of my research projects involves impact of liquid droplets on various surfaces, which causes splashes – a photogenic phenomenon dominated by surface tension effects. Many photographers approach this subject from a purely aesthetic point of view, while the inherent motivation for engineers and physicists is analytic. Fluid mechanics of droplets, soap bubbles, smoke, clouds, etc. is fascinating from both the “classic” and “romantic” perspectives, to borrow the terminology from Robert Pirsig’s “
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In that sense, it was very helpful to take a break from walking through the gardens and temporarily escape the heat by visiting a photography exhibit in one of the palaces that featured the architecture of Alhambra. Seeing the same subject through someone else’s lens not only highlighted the iconic viewpoint, but also defined what not has been done (at least within the scope of that particular exhibit). The main idea that I took from the exhibit was to vary the technique for the single subject. For example, I tried to shoot the carved walls looking directly at them and at very oblique angles, using shallow and deep depth of field, long and short lenses, in direct light and in contre-jour, etc.