I love macro photography. It makes it possible for me to see the beautiful intricacies of God’s creation of flowers and insects etc in wonderful detail.
I love the undulations of this bumble bee’s wings. I would never have seen that without macro photography.
The poppy season is just about over now. Well, it is here in my garden and in the bit of wasteground that I’ve been visiting every day on my way home from work to take shots of the most stunning poppies I’ve ever seen.
I’ll miss them, but I’ve got photos to remember them by. To me, that’s the whole point of photography. To capture something ephemeral at the height of it’s beauty so that I can go on enjoying it.
This is one of the wasteground poppies, growing on a heap of rubble.
Last year, I grew some runner beans. I enjoyed watching them grow, and I loved being able to walk down to the bottom of the garden, pick them, cook them and eat them straight away with all their freshness and flavour intact.
This year, I decided I’d expand my vegetable garden. I’m growing runner beans again, but I’m also trying courgettes, beetroot, lettuce, parsley and coriander. I already had mint and sage.
This salad is made from a couple of beetroot leaves and a few lettuce leaves cut from the growing lettuce. I’ve added some chunks of cheese, some sunflower seeds, and half an orange pepper.
It was lovely – fresh and tasty, and it was so nice that I had prepared it from leaves I had just picked in the garden.
I think I’m going to enjoy growing vegetables!
We’ve had some really good sunny weather for the past few weeks, which has given us some lovely clear skies. That means that I’ve been able to take photos of the Moon on lots of consecutive days!
My ambition is to get a shot of it on every day of it’s visible phases, and then to make a mosaic of them. I must be nearly there now! I must organise and collate the shots and see which days I’m missing.
Even though I’ve only got a fairly small point and shoot, and the quality of my photos aren’t as good or detailed as someone with better equipment, I’m really pleased with my results. The camera is small enough to carry everywhere with me, which I need to do because the skies can change so quickly.
I’ve had the situation where I saw the Moon in a lovely clear sky when I came out of work, but when I arrived home 10 minutes later it had clouded over, and stayed like that for the rest of the evening! Now that I have my camera with me, I stop and take some shots as soon as I see it.
I’m really enjoying the beautiful poppies that are around at the moment. This one’s in my garden. I’ve had these lovely pink and mauve poppies around for several years, and every year when they’ve gone over, I spread the seeds around the garden and hope that some of them will come up somewhere! Thankfully, they do!
I go out first thing in the morning when a new poppy is out, and I can get photos of it looking clean and beautiful like this one. A little later in the morning, it will have pollen all over it looking as though someone has tipped some sand into it!
I’ve been watching bees visit them and I’m fascinated to see what they do! They get right down into the bottom of the flower, lying on their side and they work their way round underneath the frondy bits – is that the stamen? They seem to hold on to a bunch of them with their legs while they wipe their mouth up and down them, presumably collecting pollen. At least I think that’s what they do. It’s all so fast. I must try and take a video of it.
I’m still enjoying my little photoshoots every day after work when I stop at a bit wasteland on the way home, but it’s lovely to have poppies in my garden where I can see them from the kitchen window and pop out any time I want to have a look or take photos.
I love poppies. They’re so beautiful, but so delicate and fleeting. I have some of the big pink ones in my garden, and I know that I must take photos as soon as I see one of them come out, as it will probably only last for a day or two.
About a week ago, I was driving to work, when I noticed a flash of pink and purple out of the corner of my eye. I stopped the car, and found a bit of wasteland where the most amazingly beautiful poppies were growing on a pile of rubble, bricks and soil! I was amazed! They’re the most beautiful poppies I’ve ever seen, and they weren’t in a beautiful garden, they were just on a pile of rubble!
I couldn’t stop then as I had to get to work, but I made sure I stopped on the way home and took as many photos as I could, reaching out over the rubble and snapping without being able to see what I was taking. Lots of them had to be deleted, but I just kept going until I had some I was pleased with.
I’ve been stopping on my way home everyday since then, because the poppies change so quickly. First there are buds, then they open out and display their beauty to the world, then the petals fall off one by one, and a beautiful fat seedhead is left. But there are lots more to come out and take their place.
I wonder how long they’ll last. How long will I be able to look forward to my little photoshoot on the way home?
As anyone who follows my blog or my Flickr photostream will know, one of the things I love to take photos of is the Moon. I love studying it, and looking at it through binoculars, but that’s fleeting. If I take a photo of it, I’ve got a record I can go back to.
My ambition is to take a shot of the Moon on each day of it’s visible phases, and then make a mosaic of them. It’s a while since I started to do it, but our cloudy English weather has made it frustratingly difficult to do.
But during April, May and June so far, we’ve had some lovely sunny weather which has given us clear skies and I’ve managed to take shots of the Moon on quite a few days, some of them being phases that I’ve never managed to get before.
So I’m getting quite excited! The good weather has been forecast to continue, so I may achieve my goal before too long!
The photo at the top is of the last Full Moon taken at 10.30pm on 27th May, and the one below was taken at 8.30am this morning when the waning Moon is 66% illuminated, one day away from being at it’s 3rd Quarter.
Last week I was holiday in Devon, so I was able to visit Wembury. It has a very special place in my memories because my Grandmother lived there when I was a child, and so I spent part of every childhood summer on the beach.
As we walked along the lane to the beach every morning, carrying spades and buckets, I got so excited. I knew that we would come to a point in the lane where suddenly the sea would come into view. It was magical. As we got nearer and nearer we could see more of the sea including the Great Mew Stone.
Soon we could see the little Church and we’d arrive at the steps down to the beach. They were steep steps and I struggled to get down them, but I suppose that’s because I was small and they just seemed steep to me. Halfway down the steps we passed a little shop selling colourful buckets and spades, nets and ice creams. I loved the bright colours.
We’d spend all day digging in the sand, making sandcastles, collecting buckets of sea water to fill the moat, paddling, climbing on the rocks and collecting shells. Mum brought sandwiches which I think we managed to eat without getting sand it them. The weather always seemed to be be warm and sunny, but thay may just be a trick of my memory.
The Mew Stone is about 5 miles out but it dominates the beach and as a child I came to love it’s shape, so it was very special to be able to take this photo of it.
The skies were clear for about a week. No planes whining overhead or writing lines across the sky. The ban on flying was put in place after a volcano near Eyjafjallajoekull glacier in Iceland spewed out a massive ash cloud that was thought to be capable of damaging plane engines. This security measure left people stranded, unable to return to the UK at the end of their holidays. Now the ban has been lifted and planes are flying again, trying to repatriate stranded people as well as take new passengers to their destinations.
There’s talk in the media questioning who is going to pay. The airlines have lost millions of pounds and some of them are saying that the Government should pay. Is that right? Should taxpayers who can’t afford holidays of their own be expected to subsidise those who can afford them?
Passengers have incurred a lot of extra expense trying to get home using other methods of transport. I think travel insurance should pay for that. If it doesn’t, what’s the point of having it? If claims for the results of the ban put up Travel Insurance premiums, then that’s the price of the situation. I don’t think that those who can’t afford holidays should be forced to subsidise those who can.
I’ve really been enjoying photographing Spring flowers. There seem to have been more of them this year than I’ve noticed before. I wonder if that’s because they’re fighting back after such a long, cold winter, or if I just haven’t noticed them before!
First of all there were snowdrops, then crocuses, then daffodils and hellebores and polyanthus. I’ve been really looking forward to the arrival of tulips. They’re so beautiful. They’re tall and elegant, and are so intricate inside.
But they haven’t arrived yet! Everything’s late this year after the cold winter. I’ve been walking around looking for them in garden borders near the pavement, I’ve been to the park, but none there. I’ve been to several flower shops and not found what I’m looking for. So when I was as a friend’s house and saw some yellow tulips in a vase, I had to take a photo! Aren’t they beautiful? What a wonderful creative work of art they are!
