Another shot taken with my iPhone and tweaked with CameraBag (this time with the “magazine” setting, whatever that means). In a way I feel like these shots are cheating, since the original itself didn’t have any particular artistic merit, but it’s something to entertain myself until I have time to do some proper photography. Also, next week in San Francisco I’ll be picking up my new Nexus One (the Google phone), so maybe there’ll be some new photo apps to play with.

In addition to the normal excuse of work and other everyday things taking time away from photography and blogging, this time I also have the excuse that my blog was hit by a trojan a couple of weeks ago, and I just got around to repairing the damage.

This shot is from a few weeks ago, when I spotted this building on the way to renew my Spanish ID card. Maybe it’s the fancy-free tile work, but for some reason it just seems like architectural happiness.

Yesterday, in addition to taking (and passing!) my written driver’s license test, I also tried to renew my Spanish ID card. I say “tried”, since after going to three separate offices and waiting in line nearly 40 minutes, I found out that my particular card requires an appointment to renew. Since one of the offices is next to the Estació de França train station, I decided to pop in for a second and take a quick photo. Early last year when I was shooting for a travel guide, the guard at the station gave me a hard time when I told them why I was taking photos (serves me right for being honest), so I decided to shoot it this time more out of spite than anything else. Take that, Spanish bureaucracy.

I’m in Athens for a few days (Greece, not Georgia), and although I’m shooting a fair number of pictures, I can already foresee the long delay before I get most of them edited and published once I’m back in Barcelona. So, in the meantime, here’s a quick shot of the carousel in the National Gardens, just up the street from our hotel. This is one of those cliché photos that everyone seems to have done but me, so now I can scratch it off my list. This particular one was a 6-second exposure, so it’s clear that no one was doing much of the famous Greek dancing at the time.

Today is the big Christmas lottery draw here in Spain, and many people will be watching the live broadcast to see if their number will be “El Gordo” (“the big one”). The lottery is a huge tradition in Spain, and some people travel hours just to buy tickets from one lucky vendor with a good track record. One town in particular, Sort (whose name means “luck” in Catalan) sees a huge influx of people around this time each year.

Even in ordinary places like Terrassa, people are willing to line up in the rain the night before the big draw in order to buy their tickets and take their chances.

Christmas ornaments decorate Viena, a restaurant in Terrassa that occupies what was once the old electric utility building. The ornate lighting fixtures inside are there all year round, and are on my list of things to photograph one day soon when time permits.

All of my complaining about unseasonably warm weather last week seems to have paid off, and then some…today temperatures are hovering near 0°C, and large parts of Spain are buried under snow. Here in Barcelona province we’ve only seen cold rain and wind so far, but it still feels a little more like Christmas.

Recycling in Spain sometimes takes a very democratic approach, with people leaving objects that they no longer want on the street for any passers-by to peruse. For example, I once left a pair of plastic organizers with a couple of dozen cassette tapes on the curb next to the trash bins. Five minutes later I passed by again and saw that at least one person had gone through to pick out the ones they wanted. Ten minutes later I saw an old woman walking down the street with the plastic bins and what was left of the cassettes. I assume that it was just her Catalan aversion to anything going to waste that led her to take the cassettes along with the bins, and not that she was a big Whitesnake fan.

Saturday’s selection included these old briefcases, which look like they’ve lived pretty interesting lives.

Nothing special today, just a shot from a quiet little street in Sant Cugat lit by morning light.

This evening’s sunset over the Rambla in Terrassa. Despite the old ladies selling roasted chestnuts in their traditional spot on the left, today’s weather was decidedly un-Christmas-like. In fact, the display in the middle distance was displaying 18°C (64°F) at the time that I took this shot.

But it was a very nice sunset.

Tables and chairs stacked outside an outdoor café in Terrassa. Actually, despite the title, it’s a very un-Christmas-like 16°C/60°F today in Terrassa. If it sounds to friends in colder climates like I’m bragging, I’m actually not…it’s hard to get into the holiday spirit when people are still walking around in shirtsleeves in December.