I took a few shots of this scene, including on film, but I like this one where the guy’s red hat matched the shirt of the person beside the pool.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 28 June 2026
Above the lido
Tag: Ricoh GR III
Curtains
I noticed the way the light was passing through the curtains in our hotel room one day and took this picture.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 1 July 2026
Still hot
It’s a whole degree cooler than yesterday’s 33.9°C in my home office today. That’s still over ten degrees hotter than I’d like it to be.
My expensive new fan arrived this morning, and is doing a decent job of taking the edge off the heat, but it’s not an air conditioner and there’s only so much that moving air flow can achieve, so it still feels oppressive and it’s been pretty hard to get motivated while working today.
Thankfully the temperatures are forecast to begin dropping over the weekend to a much more manageable mid-20s range (and, more importantly, overnight temps below 20°C, so there’s a chance to open the windows and flush out the hot air).
The sub-tropical climate of Madeira felt more manageable than this, mostly due to infrastructure designed to deal with it – air-con, tiled floors, window-shutters and the like, most of which go against the standard UK building methods that are designed to keep heat inside. If the summer temperatures in the UK continue to rise in future, then there is going to be a real need for change to prevent severe disruption.
But anyway, this is meant to be a photography blog, not an essay on climate change, so here’s another shot from the holiday. It’s another digital picture (although I have received four sheets of film negs back in the post today, so plenty of those to share too when I get around to it).
Being a Portugese territory, you’d expect to see plenty of Portugese flags in Madeira, but there were probably more than usual due to the World Cup tournament taking place while we were there (Madeira also being the birthplace of their famed striker, Christiano Ronaldo – there’s even a museum in Funchal dedicated to him). At this stage Portugal had not yet been knocked out…
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 27 June 2026
Tinny woodpecker
It’s currently 33.9°C where I sit in my home office, so this will be a quick one.
Here’s a picture of a woodpecker. A woodpecker made entirely from flattened Pepsi and energy drink cans.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 27 June 2026
Coastal puzzle
I like the way that these concrete coastal defences have been painted. Looking down on them from above (they’re maybe 5 feet long on each side) reminded me of some sort of puzzle videogame.
If you click through on the image to the larger Flickr version, you can see where footprints have set into the surface of a few of them before they hardened.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 27 June 2026
Fortress of São João Baptista do Pico
A few days into the Madeira trip, I took a walk from the hotel to an old fortress that I’d seen featured in an online tour guide. While only half a mile or so from the hotel “as the crow flies”, it was a somewhat more meandering hike “as the human walks” – and not just side to side, but also up and down as the fort was on the other side of a ridge from where we were staying. The final leg of the walk was particularly steep, proper thigh-master stuff.
Once at the fortress the views across Funchal and out south across the Atlantic were very nice. The fortress had scope for a bunch of pictures and I shot several on both film and digital (I’ll share the film pictures on a later date). In terms of other things to do, there wasn’t a great deal. There was a single open room containing paintings of the fort from various times in its history, plus a couple of small empty turret areas, but the rest of the structure was out of bounds. At first I thought I must’ve missed something but, upon asking an attendant, I was informed that more of the structure was planned to be opened at some future date. Perhaps I’ll get to revisit it one day and see the rest.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 26 June 2026
Their place
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 27 June 2026
Hotel overlook
No, not the one from The Shining!
This is a view overlooking the lawn area beside one of our hotel’s swimming pools (there were three – one indoor, and another outdoor pool on the same level from which I took this picture). The hotel was quite maze-like and it took almost until the end of our holiday to get a decent feel for how the different areas and levels all interconnected.
The white building in the picture is also part of the complex and housed one of the hotel’s a la carte restaurants on its ground floor (which is a floor below what you can see here!). The hotel reception is below the swimming pool.
This was shot on our first day at the hotel. We had a couple of days where it became quite overcast in the afternoon, although even on otherwise sunny days, the mountain tops would usually be lost to cloud come mid-afternoon.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 22 June 2026
Back in the UK
I’m home again after 11 days on the beautiful island of Madeira. I have loads of pictures to come from the trip (five rolls of film to get developed), plus a bunch of digital shots as well.
I’ll probably not get around to posting the film shots for a while as I still have a backlog of other stuff to post, but I’ll be dropping some of the digital pictures in over the coming week or so. As usual, it will be a mix of whatever caught my eye, such as this staircase in our hotel.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 22 June 2026
Further foggy day scenes
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 21 March 2026
Steel City Snapper photography 