photography

Thursday’s Special: Seaside Disorder

For some reason we mostly go to the seaside at Christmas, and not at all in high summer. Of course a beach can be a dramatic place any time of the year – changing and unchanging all at once, figuratively and physically. How we treat with it reflects our current mood or emotion – heightening or lowering it, depending on our inclinations.

This photo was taken on Ynys Mon, the island of Anglesey in North Wales. It was Boxing Day. The wind was perishing yet spirit-filling too, but then I always find ‘going to the beach’ exciting, in much the same way as I did when I was four. You just never know what you will find there in the margins between land and sea.

So here we have a tumble of razor shells embedded in a beach stream that was running off the marshy hinterland. I think there’s a viscid quality about the stream in the winter’s light, as if the shells have fixed there by the water rather than by the shift of sand. I like the slashes of greyish-white across medley of ochre shades. An intriguing state of disorder, then: the beach endlessly creating its own artwork.

Thursday’s Special

The Railway Men: Black & White Sunday

The Talyllyn Railway in mid Wales is the oldest preserved steam railway in Britain. Over the past half century it has inspired many other such ventures and there are now some 500 miles of restored lines across the country.

That they are there at all and can offer us steamingly enjoyable train rides is mostly down to armies of enthusiastic volunteers like these chaps in the photo. It’s an enterprise fraught with responsibilities too; the health and safety implications are momentous: track, rolling stock and passengers all to be kept in good order.

And in case you missed it back in June, you can read more about Tish and Graham’s big train day out at:

Partners in steam on the Talyllyn Railway – Woo-hooooo

This week at Black & White Sunday Paula’s challenge is COMPOSITION. Please visit to see her own very fine composition, and the other entries it inspired.

My own photo was composed in Dynamic Monochrome.

Operation Floral Sat Nav ~ Bee Makes Bee-Line For Foxglove

Yesterday at the Farrell establishment we had bees in poppies. Today it’s bees in the foxgloves, and thank you to Lynn at Word Shamble for mentioning bees and foxgloves in the comments. This reminded me I’d taken these snaps earlier in the month just before the foxgloves went over. I was trying out my new second-hand Canon Ixus 870 – and oh, the nippy little macro setting – I’m in love with it!

Also please drop in at Lynn’s blog to read a wicked piece of flash fiction: it definitely has a sting in the tale/tail.

Now for more shots of bees. Also just look at the foxglove’s come-hither devices – no ‘Sat Nav Map Error’ here; but an intricate systems of dots and splodges guiding in any would-be pollinator to get pollinating. It looks like every little ‘glove’ has its own touch-pad access code:

Cee’s Flower of the Day

Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge: Details

Over My Garden Fence This Morning

We didn’t invite them, but this crowd of opium poppies showed up anyway, pushing in behind the garden fence along with several other blooming gate-crashers. There’s a whole bunch more behind the garden shed. Papaver somniferum – the sleep bearing poppy, Asian in origin but now naturalised in Britain on waste ground and in field margins. And in case you are wondering, in our cool climate it does not produce the latex from which opium is derived. Better to get high by looking at them. And what a cheering sight it is on a Monday morning. So poppies, we’re glad you came. Please feel free to make yourselves at home here.

For more 4th July blooming visit Cee at Flower of the Day.

Views From The Silurian Sea

I dare say the farm fields were neither so large nor so orderly when Africa explorer, ‘Livingstone-I-presume’, Henry Morton Stanley looked out on this Shropshire landscape. For looked at it he would have when he came as a guest to The Abbey home of the Milnes-Gaskells of Much Wenlock. Stanley’s hosts were enthusiastic tour guides and brought all their visitors to Wenlock Edge to admire the view.

Those of you who come here often will know that Wenlock Edge is an 18-mile limestone ridge that runs across southern Shropshire. It is very much a local landmark, and its geology is of international scientific interest. The Edge as we know it now was formed by the uptilt of fossilized strata that were once the bed of the Silurian Sea.

Some 400 million years ago, this shallow tropical sea, that pre-dated even the advent of fish, and long before terrestrial life had evolved, once lay off East Africa near today’s Comoros Islands. You can find out more about it in an earlier post: Old Stones of Wenlock: Repurposing the Silurian Sea

On Sunday I posted an African landscape. Today is my ‘Out of Africa’ landscape, both of itself (because this chunk of Britain once lay in African waters), and on account of the photographer (that would be me) who has yet to get over leaving that continent.

But it goes to show how landscape intimately affects who we are, both physically and spiritually. It feeds our imagination, and shapes the lives we lead in a multitude of ways. Its resources may provide the basis for our livelihoods, and will have shaped communities and culture over countless generations before us. If we fail to value it, we will ultimately lose the best of ourselves, our true heritage. In Shropshire we owe great thanks to the National Trust and Shropshire Hills Area Of Outstanding Beauty, organizations that strive to creatively engage and reconnect people with the earth beneath their feet, and the natural beauty around them. More power to their purpose.

Day 7 of my Nature Photo Challenge shots. Thanks once more to Anna at Una Vista di San Fermo who started me off on this jaunt.

And view 2 in the Daily Post weekly photo challenge: Landscape

The Monochrome Garden: Dandelion Delight?

I know most of us gardeners curse dandelions, but don’t they look lovely in sepia? Little constellations. Firework bursts. Spreading those all too viable seed parachutes here, there and everywhere. You can’t keep a good weed down.

But these plants do have their uses too. Young leaves are excellent in salads. Dandelion leaf tea has long been used by herbalists to cleanse the kidneys and lower blood pressure, while the root is mainly a liver remedy, helping to boost the immune system. I do quite like dandelion coffee, perverse as this may sound, although it has to be the real roasted roots, and not the instant stuff, and it’s definitely improved with a sprinkle of raw cacao powder, and a pinch of cinnamon.

The plants of course can develop prodigious root systems. The main tap root drills down into the depths of poor soil, and so helps bring up trapped nutrients. This is one of the reasons why they are so darned difficult to dig up – they are so very busy nourishing the ground. Well that’s their story anyway. I have tried roasting the roots to make my own coffee. Very fiddly. A lot of scrubbing. And then I ate the crunchy roasted bits and didn’t have any left to make coffee. They tasted like root vegetable crisps – weird but vaguely compelling.

And I suppose I have to say too (somewhat grudgingly) that the flowers’ bright yellow faces are very cheering, although I was a bit cross to find them already grinning at me up at the allotment. In February, for goodness sake? Please give us a break, dandelions. How about a September blooming instead?

Anyway this is my entry for the last week of Jude’s monochrome garden photo challenge. With this particular composition, I’m also thinking a little of Sue Judd’s negative space challenge over at Paula’s. But please drop in at Jude’s The Earth Laughs In Flowers to see what she and others have been doing with their monochrome compositions. Next Sunday there will be a new theme: garden wild life, and a chance to show off visiting my reptiles. Yay!

Negative Space In The Mall

This week over at Paula’s Black & White Sunday, her guest Sue Judd gives us a fascinating insight into the use of negative space in our compositions. Please go and see what she has to say at: Black & White Sunday: Negative Space

Meanwhile, here are some more of my shopping mall photos. As I mentioned a few posts ago when I showed another version of the second shot, to me the mall is usually a very negative space. I’m also thinking that my metaphorical interpretation of the theme might be rather stronger than my photographic rendering of Sue’s guidelines, but I thought I’d share these rather weird compositions anyway: my study of consumer alienation.

February: Windmill Hill Twilight

There are two Changing Seasons challenges over at Cardinal Guzman’s. It’s a monthly challenge and if you want to join in you can find the rules below.

For my February photo I’ve chosen this recent shot of Windmill Hill. I caught it – in this single shot – just as the sun was going down. The landscape is still wintery, but the strange light suggests the possibility of spring. Also the windmill seems more impressive than it usually does in broad daylight. It’s good to see its mysterious side; we actually know very little about how it looked and functioned in this, its 17th century phase, only that it was probably struck by lightning.

Our local archaeologist also thinks it may be standing on or near the site of an ancient trackway, although recent trial excavations have yielded no evidence to support this. But never mind. I anyway like the glimpse (far right) of the swiftly departing small figure in blue. It rather reminds me of Daphne du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now. And yes I know that was set in Venice, but the residual horror is enough to resonate here in Shropshire and so evoke the February chills.

You can see January’s Changing Seasons HERE. In this series I am featuring Windmill Hill and the nearby Linden Field where the world’s first modern Olympian Games were held from the 1850s onwards. The Much Wenlock Games inspired the present day Olympic Movement, a fact that is now recognized. That’s a big claim to fame for our very small town, and I think it’s worth bragging about at every opportunity. Windmill Hill provided a natural auditorium back in Victorian times. Spectators and competitors came from all over Britain, and from the 1860s they could arrive by train, the station conveniently sited beside the Linden Field where most of the events took place.

Please visit the Cardinal to see his and others’ changing seasons. And then join in, if not this month, then next.

Here are the Cardinal’s Rules:

«The Changing Seasons 2016» is a blogging challenge with two versions: the original (V1) which is purely photographic and the new version (V2) where you can allow yourself to be more artistic and post a painting, a recipe, a digital manipulation, or simply just one photo that you think represents the month. Anyone with a blog can join this challenge and it’ll run throughout 2016. It doesn’t matter if you couldn’t join the first month(s), late-comers are welcomed. These are the rules, but they’re not written in stone – you can always improvise, mix & match to suit your own liking:

These are the rules for Version 1 (The Changing Seasons V1):

Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons
Each month, post 5-20 photos in a gallery.
Don’t use photos from your archive. Only new shots.

These are the rules for Version 2 (The Changing Seasons V2):

Tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons
Each month, post one photo (recipe, painting, drawing, whatever) that represents your interpretation of the month.
Don’t use archive stuff. Only new material!

Let There Be Light!

I have to say I’m rather pleased with this offering for Paula’s Black & White Sunday. The theme is ‘light’, and there are several interpretations of it here. The photograph was taken up at the allotment in a break from clearing winter weeds. This electricity pole stands slap in the middle of the back boundary fence, and for some reason I find it rather fascinating.

Please visit Paula at Lost in Translation to see her intriguing lamp-lit composition along with inspirational soundtrack from Keith Jarrett – a real Sunday treat.

Still Life At The Mall?

This image sums up how I feel whenever I go into a big shopping mall – soul sucked out, life signs shutting down, a sense of being processed, objectified in the drive to SHOP and SHOP and SHOP. On the other hand, when I came upon this scene through the strangely translucent shutters of a closed-down men’s clothing store I couldn’t have been more delighted. I didn’t have to arrange anything. It was all set out for me. I simply had to pull out my camera. Still life in the mall indeed, although sometimes you have to look hard for it.

Paula’s Black & White Sunday Challenge at Lost in Translation is Still Life. She has come up with a very intriguing take on the theme. Go see.

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge