Poppy Love

An image of a white poppy - there are a group of them which have been growing in our garden this summer.

Purple Poppy

A poppy growing in our garden.

Poppy Appeal

"I know that I repeat myself when I've got nothing left"

So here's a picture of a poppy.

Semper Vivum

Back closer to home, a poppy seems appropriate given the current anniversary that we're observing.

A STEM Subject

More flora from our garden, but this time something that's supposed to be growing there, rather than a weed - in this case, the stem of a large poppy. 

End of the Year Review, 2013

Its that time of year when its customary to look back - and forwards - so here goes.

I've made a few images of which I'm quite proud this year, perhaps five or six. Some of them are included in the montage above.

I took a different approach to my flower photography, eschewing the shallow depth of field and 'environmental' backgrounds (i.e. whatever happened to be in-shot) of previous years, opting for plain white, or occasionally black. I even put my pretensions aside and produced some colour images. In the process, I think that I've moved things forwards.

On the other hand, my landscape photography almost ceased to produce anything usable, with a late revival just before Christmas at Shapwick.

I also tried, without much success, to document events in Liverpool, as we cleared my father's house of his belongings.

Regarding this blog, I wrote one or two posts that I'm pleased with - the one about SAW, the series about Sony's strategy spring to mind - and a whole lot of pointless verbiage besides.

So, what about next year - 2014, that is?

Well, for one thing, I'm going to stop writing text to post with my images just because I feel I have to - if I have an image to post and nothing to write, then I won't write anything, aside from a short description of the image itself.

I'll try to do some more landscape photography, and get my light tent out more often.

But what about the flower photography? Have I taken that as far as I can? It actually forms the majority of what I do at the moment. My instinct is that I haven't, there's more mileage in it next year, but I really don't know what form that will take. I guess that I've a couple of months to figure that one out.

PS: Coming soon - the Williams Music Awards 2013.

Windfall

So, here we have the first image that I've posted which has been processed through my new workflow. The main difference is that I've done away with UFRaw, and introduced RAWTherapee. In practice, I still have to process my raw files to tiff and then import them into GiMP, but the RAWTherapee interface is so much nicer than UFRaw, which hasn't been improved over the years that I've been using it. Presumably the developers have been too busy hating Microsoft to bother with reworking their UI.

Anyway, back to the image itself. This is of a poppy that we found growing in one of the troughs at the front of the house earlier this year. We left it to see what would develop, and were glad that we did. The thing was enormous - about three feet tall when I made this image. We've harvested the seeds, so we should have a few more next year.

The title of this post is a reference to the fact that this is a windblown plant, but it's also a suitably obscure music reference (clue: think alt country). Anyone who spots it will get an honourable mention on this blog.

The title of the previous post is a reference to an album track from Sonic Youth's "Murray Street" album. Props to Mr Ian Dart for spotting it.