Serendipitous Cookery

This delightful hilltop town was originally established in approximately the 9th century, the location being naturally very defensible. The Basilica of St Magdelene is also a designated World Heritage Site, and while beautiful I only photographed it from the rear as sadly the front was (like so many of the buildings we visited) covered in scaffolding, undergoing renovations. Understandable I suppose, since it dates from the 11th century! This little town is, like so many in the region, a photographers paradise, and I found myself using not only the two standard lenses (24-105 and 17mm), but also the 70-200mm. This I used to create a panorama of a town that can be seen from Vezelay; in particular from the grounds of the Abbey. I don’t know the name of this little town, but just liked the resulting panorama which I have posted here.

Most of the panoramic images that I…

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.” – Daniel Burnham, Author of “The Plan for Chicago”, 1909

For over a century, the city of Chicago has lived by these immortal words by Daniel Burnham. This is the city that responded to a massively destructive fire with the world’s first skyscraper. For much of the 20th century, however, Chicago hasn’t much discerned between the scale of its vision and the scale of urban development. As landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted once pointed out, “Chicago has a weakness for ‘big things’…”.

Today, however, Chicago has committed to recreating the urban environment at the human scale. I had the pleasure of visiting my old stomping grounds in Chicago recently and was pleased to see the progress the city has made in its public spaces and bicycle infrastructure. The changes may be…