• Collage of five photos of birds, landscapes and a woman weaving
    Lens-Artists,  Mexico,  Photographic techniques

    Before and after in Mexico

    How do you feel about editing photos? Do you believe that the image you take should be the only one you present to the world? That it’s wrong to mess with the reality of what you saw? Or are you perhaps happy to tweak a shot a little, straightening a horizon or cropping out that person who wandered into it as you pressed the shutter?

  • Single magnolia flower with tree blurred behind
    London,  The Changing Seasons,  Themed galleries

    Gallery: a March selection (2024)

    Sitting on the plane that brought us home from Mexico we were congratulating ourselves on our timing. Tomorrow would be the first of March, and spring, we thought, just around the corner. We should have known better! Although in the fairly recent past (most notably the lockdown spring of 2020) we’ve had some wonderful March weather, this time last year I was writing that, ‘With a slow start to the spring this year it’s felt at times as if March was coming in more like a polar bear than a lion!’ And so it was again this year.

  • Stone church with a tower and stone cross in front
    History,  Mexico,  Monday walks

    A stroll around Villa Coyoacán

    Some ten kilometres or so south of the centre of Mexico City lies historic Villa Coyoacán. Today it is a picturesque corner of the wider conurbation but was once a village in its own right. It was founded by the Tepecana people on the shores of Lake Texcoco, a huge lake now largely drained, its area occupied by Mexico City.

  • Variety of birds on a sand bank
    Animals,  Bird place of the month,  Birds,  Mexico

    Of whales and birds in Baja

    The Sea of Cortez is considered one of the most diverse seas on earth, home to more than 5,000 species of micro-invertebrates. And where there are micro-invertebrates there are bigger animals too – sometimes much bigger. Blue whales come here to mate and calve each spring, while many other whale species are also to be seen, either seasonally or, in the case of fin and sperm whales, year-round.

  • Large stone stepped pyramid at the end of an avenue of smaller pyramids
    History,  Mexico,  Monday walks,  Ruins

    Teotihuacan, where the gods were created

    Long before the Aztecs set foot in what is today Mexico, another people built their city there, creating one of the first urban societies in the Americas. But little is known about these people. When the Aztecs arrived the city was already abandoned. Yet the new arrivals were so impressed by what they found that they named it Teotihuacan, 'the place where the gods were created'.

  • Stone carving of a face encircled by a broken ornamentation
    History,  Mexico

    A slightly sleepy museum visit

    Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropologia has to be one of the most impressive museums I’ve visited, and also one to which I really failed to do justice! My excuse is that perennial traveller’s bugbear, jetlag, compounded by a twelve hour overnight flight without sleep.