This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Mother Nature.” I wanted to do something a little better than a pretty landscape or a beautiful landscape. Sure, they’re both by mother nature but I don’t think that’s all there is. I wanted to show the creation and the power and, to a certain extent, how little control we have over the whole process. Iceland is about as good as it gets for that kind of thing, with the volcanos and geysers. We didn’t see any volcanos when we were there — which would have fitted the theme even better — but this is an image at Geysir. It’s dark and miserable, even at 11.30, in December but it’s still spectacular.

With a startling lack of originality, I present my entry in this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Polished.” I say unoriginal as it’s a pretty literal interpretation of the theme and it’s also an image I used for an earlier PhotoFriday (“Shiny“). It was taken in Stockholm, Sweden.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Ethereal.” I’m entry number 173.

• Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now! – Despite multiple failures there has been no significant release of radiation.
• Japan Earthquake: before and after – Amazing and shocking.
• Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors – I did think that the coverage suggesting a nuclear disaster was unlikely. This explains why my intuition was (probably) right.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Ethereal” and this image of some clouds taken in Den Haag, The Netherlands, is my entry.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Turbulent.” I’m entry number 134.

This is one of those weeks where all the other entries that I saw for this weeks PhotoFriday, “Turbulent,” make zero sense to me. Turbulent means disorder or chaotic which, to me, suggested a bumpy plane ride or a mass of flowing water. In the end I felt that this image of Niagara Falls (from the Canadian side) conveyed the message best. Landscapes or a bed don’t tell the same story to me.

This weeks PhotoFriday is “Open” so as I usually do, I opened Aperture and typed in the keyword. Aperture helpfully came up with… all my pictures from Copenhagen. Sigh. So it took a but longer to find this picture of an open window in Tuscany.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Contrast.” I’m entry number 249.

• Christchurch earthquake – Shocking stuff, made all the more real by the great images.
• Why Last Week’s Solar Storm Was a Dud – “If the plasma’s magnetic field is parallel to the Earth’s, the incoming charged particles are effectively blocked from entering Earth’s magnetosphere. An identical flare with a perpendicular magnetic field would have triggered a much stronger storm.”

For this weeks PhotoFriday, I thought of a picture I took a couple of years ago in Stockholm. As I usually do, I searched to see if I’d used the same image for any other challenges. It turns out I had. For a challenge titled, “Contrast.” Well, at least I’m consistent.

The above image, of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, has pretty much the same idea.

Even in December, with the fog, rain and setting sun, this view of the meeting of the European and North American tectonic plates in Iceland is pretty spectacular. Breathtaking you might say. And, for the sake of this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is one you’d think I have many possible choices: “Travel.” I note that a few of the earlier entries are pictures taken while travelling which I don’t think is quite the same thing.

My entry is about the process of travel, the open road, the destination being far away. This is also a sort of timely image, since it was taken in Egypt, a country that’s currently very much in the news.