Thematic Photographic: Road

I tend not to take photographs of roads - I don't find them very interesting. When we were in the UK, however, we spent a fair bit of time driving around, and found that often we couldn't stop to take photos. In New Zealand there is usually room to pull over by the side of the road for a scenic shot, but the English roads are narrow, with hedges or stone walls at the roadside, and there just isn't anywhere. Then, if you come to a parking area, there might be a charge of several pounds to park there, which is fine for day walkers, but not if you want to explore an area for ten minutes or so and then move on half a dozen times or more in the day.

Consequently we got quite practised at taking photos from the moving car. And I thought I would find quite a few "road" photos among the seven thousand or so I took over the month, but in fact there are far more photos of what we could see from the road than of the road itself.

I did find a couple of interesting ones, and another from a road trip in New Zealand. Incidentally, I tend to distinguish between roads and streets - the essential difference being that roads are in the countryside, and streets are urban. Where there are streets named something or other road in a city, you will usually find that they started off in the countryside, and the city expanded around them.

This view was taken on Otago Peninsula near Dunedin in the south of New Zealand



This one is at the top of a pass in Scotland aptly named "Rest and be Thankful", at the top of Glen Croe on the route between Loch Lomond and the West Coast.



And this one is in the Lake District, next to a historic slate mine, the Honister slate mine. As New Zealanders, we weren't very impressed with the "mountains" in Britain. We would be driving along and find a sign that warned of a steep descent. After a while we would find the road levelling out and say "oh, was that it?" But the Lake District was one area where we felt the hills made up in steepness for what they lacked in height (Britain's highest mountain, Ben Nevis, is about a third the height of New Zealand's highest mountain, and we have plenty more).



For more road imagery, visit Thematic Photographic here