The year was 2010. I spent a couple of hours in the city of Rijeka, but I can't remember why.
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As always, my camera was there with me, so I have a bunch of photographs to show you today.
Some of the photographs will be presented in color ...
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... others in black & white.
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In one of the side streets near the main promenade of the historic center of the city, a man was energetically playing the guitar and singing ...
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... while other people were passing him by.
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I can't tell you why I drove 120 kilometers to Rijeka on that cold, humid morning in February, there is nothing in my memory about that, but ...
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... but I still remember the music.
I didn't recognize the few songs I heard on that occasion nor can I recognize them now, but the music sounded like some old, folky (folky in the American sense of the word), singer-songwriter stuff. It sounded very good. Well, at least to me. The rest of the mobile audience didn't look very entertained by the repertoire.
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According to the metadata of these JPEGs, it appears that I observed the scene for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes and some additional seconds, more precisely.
The light was pretty dull ...
... and the colors washed out.
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In many cases, there wasn't much difference between the color and black & white versions of the shot.
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The building shown in this photograph is the National Theatre Ivan Zajtz (Zajc).
Ivan Zajc was a composer, conductor, director, and teacher born in this city. A man who dominated Croatia's musical culture for over forty years. Through his artistic and institutional reform efforts, he is credited with its revitalization and refinement, paving the way for new and significant Croatian musical achievements in the 20th century. He was born in 1832 and died in 1914. On the 16th of February 2010, when the photograph was taken, Ivan Zajc was a sculpture made of bronze ...
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... and a pigeon was resting on his hat.
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In this monochrome shot, the pigeons are flying all around the bronzified composer in Theatre Park.
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The pigeon on the composer's hat wasn't an ordinary pigeon. I think. I mean, I rarely see pigeons with plumage this dark.
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Rijeka is a coastal city with a fairly big industrial port.
These structures in the port look a bit like some mechanical giraffes. Or dinosaurs.
Here you can see some lamps from the same seaside area. In the following shot ...
... I changed them a bit through the simple invert option in Photoshop.
Here you can see the same mechanical giraffes (or dinosaurs) but from a slightly different point of view. In the following photograph ...
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... a jackdaw entered the scene.
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Here you can see some big, and probably very heavy, blocks of stones. I mean, it looks like stones ... so... I don't know, I'm not an expert in this industrial stuff.
In this shot, you can admire a bunch of simple but kinda artsy lines on one of those blocks.
This place looks like a storage area. I don't know where exactly I was in the city, at that point.
Here you can see a group of high-rise buildings photographed through the empty space between the blocks of stones.
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Here I zoomed in on one of those buildings ... and on some lovely old buildings situated lower on the hill.
In this shot, you can see both kinds of buildings in their entirety, but you can't see any color.
Here you can see some details on one of the buildings closer to me.
This photograph was taken closer to the promenade.
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Some work was in progress on one of the rooftops there.
Here you can see a more down-to-earth scene from the same area.
Soon I left the city. I have no more urban photographs to show, but ...
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... but, I did take a few more shots on the way back home.
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Here you can see the friend who was there with me. In many colors and in black & white too.
The clouds looked cool ...
... and this small olive tree was fairly photogenic too.