Estonia might be a tiny country, but its seagulls are huge! (Wink!)
If you've never had nightmares about birds, you will now (and there's evolutionary (precedent). But here's a cuddlier, non-threatening version of the image. I've used a shallow depth of field to blend Tallinn's colorful rooftops and greenery into a glowing, neon background you see here.
I've been to the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Black Sea and the Sea of Japan, but it was not until sailing the Baltic that I began to understand why artists like Ivan Aivazovsky chose seascapes as the primary subject of their paintings.
Leaving Saint Petersburg--with a sun that never sets--and an ivory castle in the sky:
Calm, rhythmic waves off the coast of Copenhagen in early summer were not enormous, but nonetheless immediately reminded me of the iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa woodcut.
From the Hanseatic League to the Soviet Union, Tallinn has had quite the history. Yesterday, I recorded its traces in mobile detail by exploring a bit of the old part of this maritime Estonian city.
I've spent the day sailing from Denmark en route to Estonia--and having never done anything like this before--I feared claustrophobia. Instead, I realized that I could stare at the waves for hours--meditatively--especially if the said process is accompanied by the right kind of music. (And I'm not talking about incessantly--jokingly--quoting Iron Maiden's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Coleridge's original by extension.)
I'm not very musical, but I compensate by having a heightened sense of pattern recognition, especially the visual kind. So I stood eight floors above sea level for quite some time just observing the waves emanating from the ship and matching them to one of my favorite Japanese musical projects as if this were a live, hypnotic music video. The largest, choppiest, white-crested waves created by the vessel's engine--pushing us ahead at 15 knots across the Baltic--stood for fast-paced, distorted, metallic guitar riffs, whereas the song's principal melody coincided with slower, gentler outlier waves mimicking its underlying rhythm. And then, of course, there were the deep, wailing vocals speaking to the waters' raw elemental power itself.
"Morje" in my native Russian, "mer" in French, "mare" in Latin, and "marr" in Old Norse are all derived from the original Indo-European stem "mori." And to me, "morje" is a confusing mix of fear and fascination: I was born of, and my loyalty is with a telluric power, yet my preferred sport is long-distance swimming, not to mention some historic and cultural interest in the seafaring nations.
There is just one more thing: there are no clouds, but I can't see the Moon.
P.S. All images are mobile.