Flooding Burn

Sorry, I was away from my blog for a while. We went for a holiday in York, and that was the week it flooded! Miraculously, our main road out of town was cleared hours before our departure, but we passed a couple of drowned fields on the way. The tops of the hedgerows barely cleared the water.

Now there are floods where we are, including the little burn out the back. It overflowed across the path, but has receded now, touch wood. I’m beginning to feel chased around by these muddy rushing rivers…

Hope to get myself sorted out soon, then I’ll get back to responding to blog comments.

The burn seen from our back gate.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Summer

Taken in the garden a few days ago.

Look, No Feet!

I liked Sarah’s series of photos that glance down at her shoes (especially this one). Loafing round the garden yesterday, I decided to be a real copycat and try something similar. Turns out there are certain obstacles to this kind of shot here!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unfocused

Oops, this is an old photo challenge, but I have gone to some trouble preparing the photo for publishing, so I’m posting it anyway.

We were out this morning, and when I came in the front door and saw the way my two cats were sleepily regarding me, I took photos, trying to capture their mood. Unfortunately the girl cat (Delilah) first of all just put her head down and closed her eyes, and didn’t look at the camera the way she had looked at me… then she sat up and did a very sweet green-eyed yawn, and at that precise moment my camera decided it had run out of card-space!!!!

That sort of thing is enough to throw you into a screaming tantrum.

I behaved myself though, and fetched another camera card… by that time Delilah had hopped off and left through the cat flap. Thank goodness for Samson, who stayed in bed, occasionally blinking at me, though with not quite the roguish grin that he had before.

I tried to focus sharply on him (dark room and ageing eyesight), and sometimes managed; other times it was way off, like here… I would have deleted this picture without a second thought, but I suddenly remembered the photo challenge.

Well, I thought, if I have to post a fuzzy photo, it might as well be this one! I made it even softer in Photoshop, mostly round the edges. Will have to look and see what other challenges I can respond to… my camera has been a bit covered in cobwebs recently.

Memory of a Garden

Well, I wimped out of blogging my letter to myself (it was a WordPress prompt… write a letter to yourself to be read in one year).

It wasn’t all that personal a letter so I don’t know why I wouldn’t post it… this British trait of fearing to seem ‘too earnest’?

Perhaps we think being too earnest tempts fate and earns ridicule. I would rather have written something very light, amusing, and happy-go-lucky! Anyway…

The following image was part of the letter… I found it that day and was surprised, as I didn’t remember doing any panoramic images. I remembered trying, and finding it was impossible to do a good one unless you have the right kind of tripod or lens (way too expensive for normal people). But it seems I did end up with pictures to make me think “oh yes, those surroundings are so familiar!”

This one is only half of the garden… it was a bright day, so I assume the other half was over-exposed.

Click image for slightly larger view.

Snow Views

View of the snow from my computer room window this morning. At least one photo is pixellated because I saved it as a low quality JPEG. And the camera was fighting me… it didn’t want to take it because the light was too low!

I’ve begun reading ‘Master and Commander’ by Patrick O’Brian. Mum says she is rereading the entire series for the second time. “It’s better than Hornblower,” she said.
“What?! How can anything be better than Hornblower?”
“Well, I thought nothing could be better, but if anything is, THIS is. It has a lot more detail.”
“I was looking for something vaguely Christmassy to read, like Ellis Peters. Does the Master and Commander have Christmases, or is he too busy pursuing his own personal vendettas?”
“Oh, he has Christmas on board with extra food. And he doesn’t pursue vendettas really; he’s too naive.”
“Well, if you happen to be looking for something Christmassy to read, you should re-read the Moomins… they’re just right for this time of year.”
“I was thinking about doing that.”

We like our cold snowy books.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

 

Peace, Space and Trees

I spend a lot of time indoors and I’m definitely no gardener… but recently I’ve taken to going out into the garden and sitting by myself with a mug of home-brewed coffee. You collect cats while you’re there… usually a maximum of three, as two are elderly and stay in their beds.

I love it when it’s lush and not over-mowed. With popping buttercups and daisies, nodding clematises, trees with different types of leaf, all rustling and swaying. The clematises and trees of various sizes surround you and lean over above, and the neighbours can’t see you through all the greenery. Then there’s the blue sky and billowing white clouds, and the occasional bird silhouette.

Oh, and large groups of walkers with rucksacks, going two-by-two along the track at the bottom of the garden! There’s a tall, dark hedge there and they tend not to see you, but I can see them. If they could see me, I would hate it, but the cats and I watch cautiously, and feel that we’ll be OK if we don’t move…

The cats in particular have to be careful, because owners leave their dogs off the leash, and sometimes they come into the garden. A black Labrador came at least twice into our house to eat the cat food. We haven’t seen it recently, so maybe the owners saw what it was doing.

Listening to footsteps and car doors slamming, I imagined myself peering round the wall of clematises at the neighbours, wondering whether or not to say good morning. They don’t need to know I’m there unless I come out, and I wondered if there are sheltering banks of clematises on the internet. Presumably Facebook doesn’t have any.

Because of the way the vegetation is above your head as well as all around you, I found myself thinking (again) how no camera or camcorder could ever capture that, though maybe a fish-eye lens would have a good stab at it! I would love to have an extremely wide angle lens. I got a telescopic zoom lens, but it’s frustrating because I would rather get the full picture than zoom in on details.

My new mobile phone (a gift) just beeped at me. Nobody ever texts me, so I thought at first it was my hearing aid’s ‘low battery’ beep. Then it occurred to me to wonder where the other beepy thing was, and started to panic as I couldn’t find it at first (“don’t tell me I’ve lost it already!”) Finally found it under a pile of collapsed CD boxes, placed there by Mum.

Sister just fiddling with her phone to see what various things do… it’s less easy to hide behind clematises when you have a loud beepy thing with you!

Wall of Clematises

June Poppy

I’ve been meaning to put this on my blog for some weeks now! I was looking at someone else’s poppy picture on a wallpaper site, and of course my first thought was “mine is better — it’s better composed.” I think it is, but then I realized the colour isn’t as vivid as in the other picture. Oh well.

Inside-Out Day

Yikes — was in town feeding some cats, and it’s raining… not in a hard, showery kind of way, but in a cold, wet, miserable, relentlessly dripping kind of way. Looking in the shop windows you see a lot of mannequins wearing light cotton summer togs, and it makes you feel even colder than you were to start with. They should withdraw the summer clothes and put autumn gear on their racks! Beachwear’s just a mockery when the weather’s like this.

We went for coffee, which tasted horrible, but I was charmed when I noticed the neon-lit coffee logo on the wall reflected in mine, sharp and clear as glass. Those of us who enjoy taking photos should take our cameras into coffee shops and see what we come up with! Preferably not using flash. And if you buy a foamy cappuccino, you probably won’t notice any kind of reflection…

When we got home, I noticed to my horror that my T-shirt was on inside-out; I had been sitting in the coffee shop like that… admittedly in a quiet, dark corner, and probably nobody noticed. All the same…! I pointed it out to Mum, and she said she noticed, but thought I’d done it deliberately! It looked very nice, she said, and completely in keeping with the current fashions.

Anyway, I had some photos building up to put on my blog, and was annoyed when the ISP started telling us we would run out soon… I had to wait. The first one is nothing much… just me chasing clouds again. It was taken about 10 minutes before the thunderstorm hit.

Chasing Clouds

It’s a single frame; I edited the Raw image to bring the trees out of shadow.

You can click on the pictures to view slightly larger sizes. The next one I’m pleased with… it’s an HDR merge of four separate shots I took out of the window during the thunderstorm!

Rainy Hedge

Individually, the photos that go to make up the rainy hedge are poor snapshots — you can see strong reflections on the windows. (The white, shimmering form of my little old iMac was quite distinct!) I wasn’t using a tripod, so every shot was framed differently, with the camera waving around. One shot was overexposed. In short, they’re the kind of pictures most sane people delete right away, if they even bothered to take them in the first place.

But I was bored and waiting for something else to happen, so I scooped up the five JPEGs and told my HDR program (Photomatix) to merge and tone-map them, matching the features… I figured it would be a horrible mess, but when you’re bored, you will try anything! I was surprised at the result. A bit grainy, but that’s par for the course when using JPEGs at similar exposure settings (they’re supposed to vary, and Raw images are better).

I took the HDR picture into Photoshop Elements because the whole picture was flat and busy, and managed to work a little shade into it and reduce some of the grain… anyway, I like this. I’m surprised there wasn’t more ghosting and spotting, and I’m also surprised that the window reflections have pretty much disappeared.

iPhoto on the iMac keeps dropping hints that I should allow it to scoop up all of my photos from the camera card, but I took a dislike to iPhoto and have been using Adobe Bridge instead. Every time I start up my iMac, iPhoto grabs all the photos and waits hopefully for me to load them, and I just shut it down. I’m cruel. (Have now changed the settings to put it to sleep).

Adding to the Memory Store

It’s hot and muggy, which might explain the difficulty sleeping. I sat in the garden with mother and sister, and said “it’s impossible to completely capture a place,” and they said “what do you mean?”
“If you take photographs of the garden, it’s not like the real thing.” Of course not.

The insects buzz against the deep, inviting shade; the leaves and grass shimmy, the daisies pop against the lawn. A warm scent of flowers wafts on the breeze. The sky is blue, the sun burns your skin, and the clouds move in stately pace across the sky. A beetle crawls across your foot, and the cats walk around and try not to look bored. Bring out your camera and everything is flattened and dulled; the sun goes in, the insects disappear and the clouds fade.

Still, we try. Nothing will beat Virtual Reality as an art form once it really gets going… they’ll put the bugs in too; don’t think they won’t.

I did my best with my Canon… took photos of everything that moved and a lot that didn’t, and the day went dark. A breeze sprang up, and the air felt full of incipient rain. We went inside and looked out at a thunder storm with rain plashing down. I wasn’t good at capturing that either.

I’ve complicated my photo reorganization by adding to the mass of stuff to sort through — but it wouldn’t be such fun if you didn’t get new ones to look at.

Molly

Cheeky -- when she finally looked round!