It was a place crowded with locals and tourists a couple of months ago, but when I visited Ambrela today after buying some stuff in the city, the beach was deserted. It looked like some mysterious event had wiped out the human element from the setting.
If the the day wasn't so sunny the atmosphere could have been quite eerie. With this kind of weather and so many bright shades of blue, that was impossible.
Besides the sun and the sea, the beach offers also a bit of art and architecture to a photographer.
Just like the beach, this place is called Ambrela. The Ambrela Bistro & Beach Bar.
Usually, when writing a post like this, I find the names of places on the Internet becouse I'm rarely focused on boards & adverts there on the spot. But this time, I photographed the name written in white letters on the glass. A few minutes before this shot was taken ...
... I was focused on my own reflection in the same glass. The reflection of a friend who was there with me is also present in the picture. Behind us, you can see the unreal duplicate of a sunny day by the sea. In the following photograph ...
... you can see more of the large terrace on which all this was going on.
Not far from there, a local genius was walking towards the sea. I will tell you a few more words about this oversized brain later, right now, I suggest that we go back to the terrace of the Ambrela Bar.
Here you can take a good look at the view the terrace offers. In summer, you can enjoy that bright blue view while drinking or eating something. The air in summer is permeated with the scent of fried food, ice cream, and sun tan creams.
For me, the most interesting aspect of this photograph is the trio of isolated cypress trees in the left-central part of the picture.
That's why I zoomed in on them in this shot. These elegant, candle-like trees are pretty iconic and definitely very photogenic in this context.
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This photograph was taken an hour earlier near the parking lot in which my car was parked. You can see a small fig tree growing from the base of the trunk of an old pine. Trees can tell interesting stories if you are willing to observe and listen.
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Some birds behave like pets in the area around Ambrela Beach.
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Seagulls, pigeons, and crows are sharing the food. It may seem that the food is much scarcer now than it was in summer but about ten minutes before these photographs were taken, while I was still in the car, a group of people was feeding them with old bread.
We, which means my two friends and I, spent a couple of minutes with the birds, and then ...
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... continued toward the beach.
Across the parking lot, there is a monolith. I mean, is a board made of metal but it looks a bit like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It stands proudly at the entrance of the park decorated with sculptures of local artists. The board is an artwork itself. The silence here is rusted and the words are empty. Since the letters are made of empty space, the color of the text changes depending on the background. That's pretty cool. I find simple things like this quite exciting.
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I know most of the people mentioned on the metal board very well. Some of them were my teachers in high school, and then friends later in life when we became equals that create art.
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Here you can see a friend entering the park.
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These artsy artificial shrubs are made of metal. The stylization of autumnal foliage gives some much-needed warm colors to the evergreen coastal scenery.
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These more up-close shots show how intricate the artwork is. I didn't find any name near the sculpture but since I know the people I can recognize their style in many cases. Not in this one, though.
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The Walking Brain is my favorite. The artist had in mind a shape that could be perceived as a cloud but also as a brain. I don't know, maybe the sculpture looks exactly like that to someone else, but to me, this is always a brain. With quite a few clouds deployed along the horizon, I don't need them here, and I absolutely love the sculpture.
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This skeletal creature is supposed to be some kind of fish but it looks more alien and interesting than a fish to me. I like this thing a lot.
The park has more sculptures to offer, but I stopped photographing them because...
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... well. becouse I noticed some mushrooms in the fresh green grass before my feet. I love art a lot. Art is something I have always done since I'm aware of myself, practically, being focused on creating art always made shitty moments of my life, and my shitty states of mind bearable. But I love nature even more.
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These are the Agrocybe praecox mushrooms. In the following two photographs ...
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... you can see a bunch of fresh, young Coprinopsis atramentaria coming out of the ground. Five or six meters from the mushrooms ...
... I found this thing. The piece of garbage looked like an artwork in the context of the park. The following photograph ...
... was taken when I reached the beach.
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The sea was beautifully blue. And beautifully green & turquoise too. In this set of twelve photographs, you can see some of the shape-shifting textures of its changing surface.
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In this photograph, I zoomed in on a large cavity in the distant rocks of the stretch of coastline across the bay.
Here I zoomed in a bit more. I mean, I used all the zooming power my camera can provide, in this shot.
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A bit later I zoomed in on some distant apartment buildings.
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Their completely white architecture looks pretty good among the lush green vegetation that doesn't change its color with the changing of the seasons.
This building is situated even closer to the sea. It looks like another beach bar or restaurant similar to the Ambrela Bistro & Beach Bar.