I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away

Last year, despite the apricot tree having several flowers, it only set one fruit (which turned out to be the most delicious apricot in the history of the world); we'd hoped for better things this year - one fruit each, perhaps, instead of having to share. It duly developed several flower buds which swelled promisingly, and in the last few days of mild weather and sunshine they started to open.

They are no more. Today they were all systematically removed by this little so-and-so:





Having stripped the tree he then spent the next seven hours of daylight battering at the window, fluttering from the top of the frame to the window-ledge at the bottom and up again, and getting into most undignified positions.





I wonder what roast bluetit tastes like.

Any dream will do

Back around the time of the First World War a branch of my family lived out in Persia, as it was known then. My great-aunt was a talented watercolourist and produced many very pleasing pictures of various scenes, and when the family returned to England in the early 1920s she wrote a book about the country and used her own pictures to illustrate it.


The picture on the cover is particularly colourful, and as a small girl I was thrilled to learn that the actual costume was still in the family's possession. I longed to dress up in it and copy the pose in the picture, but circumstances meant there was never a good opportunity to get it down from the loft. Until we were emptying my mother's old home, whereupon I seized the trunk it was in and bore it, and the original watercolour picture, away to Genie Towers for safe keeping. Today I decided the circumstances were right for dressing up!


I shouldn't have too much difficulty getting into these!



The fiddliest bit was trying to get the headgear right, wondering which of the squillions of pieces of silk in the trunk were the right ones, and trying to drape and knot them correctly It would have helped to have someone who knew how these things worked, but Ned made a very good model's dresser, and eventually we decided we were ready for a shoot.



All in all I'm very pleased with the result, and I had such fun fulfilling this childhood ambition!

I wish I could fly way up to the sky but I can’t

Stu's latest Tuesday Challenge, should we choose to accept it, is "to come up with the most fantastic idea. What would you shoot if time, money and skills were no issue? Then work within your limitations to realise your dream. See what unique surprises occur."

At last, a reasonably straightforward one. If I had the time, money, equipment and skills I'd go off to Borneo and/or Sumatra and photograph orang-utans in the wild. I think they're marvellous creatures who are teetering on the brink of extinction solely due to Mankind's greed. Hundreds of square miles of their limited habitat is being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations, a product that it seems impossible to boycott in protest because it's in everything. And to add insult to injury, it's being promoted as a source of bio-fuel to 'save the planet'. What a ridiculous concept - its very production is directly destroying far more than it will ever save.

So if I had pots and pots of money that's where I'd go; taking supplies to the orangutan orphanages where they try to raise the babies whose mothers have been killed by the rainforest clearance companies and sold as pets, and if possible to buy land to donate to them as habitat to release them when they're old enough. Whilst there I'd take photos of them - lots and lots of photos. But I haven't yet won the lottery, so my limitations are many, making this photo the closest to my dream that I'm likely to get. I'm not sure about 'unique surprises', though.

Time it was and what a time it was it was

You couldn't get a book between them.

This indecision's bugging me

Tuesday Challenge #22
The challenge this week is to go through your archive and pick out your best picture so far.

Aaarrrrggghhhh! Define 'best picture'! Some of them required spot-on timing but could be reproduced (and haven't transferred well to digital) whereas others are precious memories, and irreplaceable.

This one is moody:



This one makes me laugh:



This one reminds me of a very happy day:



Poohsticks: innocent childhood pleasures:



The timing needed to catch the flame coming from the barrel of the cannon wasn't as easy as you might think:



An iconic image from a particular place:



And finally this one for the shapes and colours.

Sometimes you picture me

This week's Tuesday Challenge theme is Fairy Tales. "Interpret this in any way you wish."

So, as all good fairy tales begin ...



(I got some very strange looks from people at the garden centre as I lurked by the pots of thyme.)

And walk together down an English lane

Stu's latest Tuesday Challenge involves not using the viewfinder of the camera to set up the shots; basically, return (if you have a camera that ever left!) to the days of point-and-click.

So there’s your challenge. Take a bunch of photos without using any kind of viewfinder or checking the images on the rear screen afterwards. Post your best one of the week!

I can't decide which of these I prefer; the straightforward view


the catch-it-as-it-happens with an unco-operative subject (which would have been great if I hadn't cut off the end of his tongue)


or the worm's eye view.

Slip-slidin' away

This week's Tuesday Challenge is to "take a picture of a creepy-crawly - spider, insect, etc. Preferably a real one, and preferably close-up enough to make out detail. Preferably artistically pleasing rather than just a documentary shot."

This fulfils at least some of the criteria.



This tinkered-with version looks quite interesting as well:

With a little help from my friends

I can't seem to get rid of the annoying caption at the top, but here's my Tuesday Challenge storyboard. Many, many thanks to the lovely people who've helped me (you know who you are).

 

Run for home run as fast as I can

This week's Tuesday Challenge was "Ten second start". Basically, find out how your camera's self-timer works, put your camera somewhere with a guard so that it's unlikely to get stolen (or, in my case, run over), and run away as fast as you can.

Here's mine:

Looking down on creation

For this week's Tuesday Challenge we had to take a picture where our camera was at least 30 feet (10 metres) above the subject of your photo. I get wobbly standing on a chair, so I wasn't over-impressed at this at first! And my camera is a very very very basic point-and-click (with monumentally irritating shutter delay) so no chance of doing anything particularly fancy. But then I found a couple of places where I could keep my feet firmly on the ground, so that was okay.

The first one has had a tweak or two - I'm not sure whether or not that's against the rules, but anyway ...

Arlescote



Here it is untweaked. See, it still looks like Toytown!




The other one is totally au naturel - utterly untampered - so I know for sure that's not cheating.

Jacob's Ladder

Every picture tells a story, don't it

This week Stu's Tuesday Challenge was to take a photo of something that wasn't there; he describes the mission thusly:

"This week, the subject is absent from the frame. This could be for various reasons - location: your subject is present but off to one side of the frame; temporal: your subject was present but has now gone."

I had several ideas (and might yet set one of them up, weather permitting) and missed a corker through not taking my camera to work. A client rushed in with her dog which had cut its leg quite badly, and it left the most perfect trail of scarlet footprints across the reception floor and into the consulting room. Instead I came up with these:




I reckoned that the flower-bedecked tree where a young girl died was ghoulish and in poor taste.

Blue, blue, my world is blue

This week's Tuesday Challenge was simply "Blue". A seemingly straightforward topic has many possibilities; as well as just blue objects, 'blue' can mean depressed, or the Boat Race (Oxford and Cambridge blue), or the police force (boys in blue) or even pornography. But on a beautiful day like today, all I had to do was look up ...

Give me one moment in time

This weeks's Tuesday challenge was to take just one picture,and do all the planning and setting-up in your head before taking the picture, and not take another one when you notice the telegraph pole sprouting from someone's head - that sort of thing. And, if possible, make it more of a challenge by shooting a moving object. Well life's pretty peaceful round and about - the only dynamic moving object was one sheep's jaws as she chewed the cud. So with the flipping annoying shutter delay I couldn't get her with her jaw amusingly over to one side, but instead she has her mouth open.

"I don´t belong here", said old Tessa out loud

I had a cunning plan to obtain another image for the 'Red' theme; I'd go to the supermarket greengrocery area and arrange the red peppers into an artistic heap to see what interesting shapes could be obtained. What I hadn't realised was that, because of the inclement weather, the supermarket would be heaving with people stocking up as though for a siege. Anyone would think it was a bank holiday. When I eventually struggled through to the fruit and veg I was alarmed to see that there weren't many red peppers left; but to make matters worse no sooner did I start arranging the remainder than other customers came and snatched them away. So I had to snap what I could before they vanished entirely, and hope for the best. This is the best I could get in between the grabbing hands.

I was following the pack

Just in case there are people who aren't yet bored with pictures of the recent weather conditions, here are some more ...


I love the way the falling snowflakes flare in this one of the village church. Unfortunately I didn't get it quite in the frame due to the dogs I had with me at the time jogging me, and then the camera battery finally died. But it's still a nice enough shot.

This tree just looked so beautiful I couldn't resist it.


I was very taken with the monochromism monochromosity black-and-whiteness of this scene through the wood. It makes me think of Narnia and the Lantern Waste.


Our road never gets gritted, which makes for interesting driving.

Three to get 'reddy'

Three possibles for the Tuesday Challenge.




I have an idea for another one - but it depends whether we can get out of the village!

When I'm feeling blue

What a shame this week's photo theme isn't 'Blue'. Blue we can do. Harry and Piglet love running in the snow ...





Beattie, however, wasn't impressed. (And was about as red as we could manage.)


I'll have a bash for 'red' another time.

It's been a long cold lonely winter

This week (just got in by the skin of my teeth) Stu's Tuesday Challenge was to produce an image suitable for a magazine, either front cover (portrait layout) or for a double-page spread (landscape layout). My muse ran away screaming at this particular idea so here's a fairly rubbish (but showing willing) picture for a bonsai mag showing the green shoots of recovery.

Water difference a day makes

For Stu's Tuesday Challenge #2 I thought about using this picture I took in Cornwall last year



but he said that using existing pictures isn't really on, so I went out today and took this one instead:


And this ....



and this too.