Julie Dawn Fox Photography

Coimbra is known as Portugal’s university city. Just down the hill from the university, the botanical gardens are often overlooked by visitors. Here are a few examples of what’s behind the railings.

Avelar Brotero is the man to thank for developing the gardens and his statue greets visitors as they pass through the elaborate stone pillars and wrought iron gate.

Tropical palm trees and autumn leaves cast a shadow on the 16th century aqueduct that runs alongside the gardens.

A range of autumnal colours.

Unusual stringy palm leaves.

The gardeners’ space.

Hanging baskets in a bastard pepper tree from South America.

A couple take a stroll down Lime Tree Avenue.

I must have a ‘thing’ for windows as I’m forever taking pictures of them. Here are a few of my favourites:

I love the idea of dog as nosy neighbour. He’s even got a rug to lean on as he gazes out over the streets of Évora, Portugal.

How about this for a funky gardening shop? This is in Ponte da Lima, a riverside town in northern Portugal.

A Notting Hill resident makes the most of his windowsill during the Notting Hill Carnival, London, UK.

I’m a sucker for Islamic architecture and was suitably awed by the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

I’m also rather partial to stained glass. I found this inside an apartment block in Caracas, Venezuela.

Still in Caracas, this is the view of the city and the Ávila mountain that dominates it from my apartment window.

And while in Venezuela, I spotted this in a church in the hillside town of Colonia Tovar, which was founded by German settlers and isolated from Venezuelan people and culture until the 1960s.

These windows form part of an art installation called Luz (Light) which were hanging from a wall in the village of Alcaide in Portugal during the mushroom festival.

Given that things will have moved on again in the camera world by the time I’m ready to do that, I’ll keep my wishlist relevant to my short term needs.

I’d like:

• a spare battery or two so that I don’t have to worry about taking higher resolution photos or videos, or being away from a power source for too long
• a Joby gorillapod because I haven’t got a tripod at all and this looks brilliant and versatile. I want to practice taking shots that require longer exposure and this will be essential.
• an extra SD memory card or two, probably 1 or 2 GB so that I reduce the risk of losing all my photos in one fell swoop
• more time to play around, learn the settings and how to use them and experiment so that I can get the light right in my shots

I currently use a Canon PowerShot SX210IS point and shoot using the AUTO setting and a Class 10, 8GB SD card.

When I bought it, a year ago, I didn’t feel ready to take on a DSLR and didn’t think I needed one. A year later and I still haven’t got around to finding out how to manually set it to ‘macro’ so that I can take pictures of flowers, despite being frustrated on several occasions when the camera wouldn’t automatically detect them.

Having read the course notes so far, I can see that I will need to get a DSLR at some point in the future but for the time being, I want to learn how to use my point and shoot to its full potential. Once I’ve got my head around that and become frustrated with its limitations (and saved up some money!), I’ll move on to the professional kit.

These places look interesting and could be worth approaching with my photographs:

Competitions:

http://travelphotocompetition.wanderlust.co.uk/

http://www.photocompetitions.com/

Magazines and publications

http://www.worldhum.com/info/submissions/

http://matadornetwork.com/betamag/

http://jpgmag.com/about/photos

http://www.outdoorphotographer.com/

http://www.transitionsabroad.com

http://www.visitportugal.com

I want to become a freelance travel photographer in order to complement  and increase the potential revenue from my own travel writing.

I’d be happy to sell photos without articles too and enter competitions but I don’t expect to get rich from doing this.

I particularly enjoy landscape, architecture and flower photography. My main focus will be Portugal, because that’s where I live as an expat.

The best shoe shop in the world

The best decision I ever made was to give up my job in a bank and set off on a 16-month solo backpacking trip. During that time, I got a glimpse of Los Angeles, found unparalleled paradise in the Cook Islands, toured the North and South of New Zealand and spent a year working my way around Australia before getting a taste of Bali and Lombok and finishing up in Thailand.

When I returned to the UK, I knew two things for sure: I wanted to live abroad, preferably somewhere sunny, and to be able to travel more. I flirted with a career in travel writing but didn’t have the confidence at the time to go all the way; I needed the security of a steady income. With these goals in mind, I set about becoming a teacher of English as a Foreign Language.

Teaching English has enabled me to live in and explore Spain, Tanzania, Venezuela and Portugal with short stints in Kenya, Uganda, Poland and Italy. I’ve also travelled in Turkey, Germany, Austria, Czeck Republic, Mexico, Hungary and France. I’m based in Portugal now and although I still enjoy teaching, I’ve rekindled the flames of my passion for travel writing and am busy learning how to do it better so that I can take the leap of faith this time.

Travelling has taught me to appreciate how other people live and how to adapt to different situations. It’s given me the confidence to deal with the unexpected and the joy of discovering places, people and things that I never even imagined and certainly didn’t plan to find.