Chive Talking

There are some chives in a terracotta pot at the front of our house, which are currently flowering with a bright purple, spiky bloom. Their logs stems make them the devil's own job to photograph in even the slightest breeze.

So it took me a while to make this image - I'd like to think that the blurring is due to my creative use of depth of field, however its probably down to the thing swaying about so much.

What Rhymes With Osteospermum?

Sternum, I guess.

We have some pots on the riverbank at the back of the house.That makes it sound like something from an E M Forster novel, which it isn't, but I digress.

Recently, we've managed to spend a couple of weekends at home and that means only one thing - gardening. So these osteospermum arrived to supplement the under-performing strawberry plants in the riverbank pots. This is where I made this image, on a glorious summer evening a week or so ago.

The garden is actually at its best at this time of year and I have a whole load of images which need processing, amongst which there will hopefully be some which are worth posting, so watch this space. 

A Mumbled Question

The May Day bank holiday weekend saw us driving round England and Wales. Starting on the Thursday evening with Swansea to drop off son and heir, then up to Manchester for a family wedding, on to Liverpool to check on my father's house and back to Swansea by the end of the Saturday.

Sunday morning found us on the beach at the Mumbles, collecting shells. It's not really a picturesque environment, despite it's reputation, and a light haze meant that my attempts to photograph the landscape came to nothing. However, I did make this image of an O ring which I found somewhere near the jetty.

Having carted several handfuls of shells back to the car, we went off to Joe's Ice Cream parlour via the crazy golf course then back to Swansea for lunch. By the end of the day, we'd made it back to Somerset.

Seed 'ed

Another image from the spring garden, although this one is of a head that's already shed its seeds. I wish I could tell you what sort of plant this is, but I don't know its name. Its a low bush with long stems and large, fury green flowers. 

No, me neither.

Tulip Three

Another image from the tulip session as promised in my previous post. Not as symmetrical as the previous image, not as pleasing in its formality, but I like the detailing on the petals. And the shape does lend itself to the square format, and the square format lends itself to images of flowers.

Et Tu Lip, Two

This is more like it. I spent so much time mucking about with the previous image that the tulips had actually bloomed by the time that I posted it. And so here is the actual flower.

This works as a monochrome image, I think, unlike the previous one and for reasons that I don't quite understand. I did make a right pils of the white balance when capturing this image - thank God for UFRaw. Despite all the opprobrium that I've heaped on the heads of the developers, I'd have been stuck without it on this occasion.

Anyway, when you're on a roll and all that - I have at least one more decent image for this session, which I'll post soon.

Et Tu, Lip

I generally don't spend that much time working on the images that I post - you may, or may not find that surprising. However, I spent what seems like endless amounts of time over several evenings mucking about with this one.

This is probably because the initial idea that I had for this image didn't work, for reasons that I'm not entirely clear on. The intention was that it would be a monochrome image set against a dark background, a la Edward Weston. 

Anyway, I created the layer mask - which took an age and I ended up painting the thing, which I try to avoid - did the conversion and fiddled with Curves, but I just couldn't make it work. So, I sampled the image to produce the background colour, pushed the saturation a bit, here we are.

I should say that the photograph was taken mid afternoon in our garden against a white background. I suspect that this is the problem - what the image really needs is raking light to boost the contrast and define the texture of the flower better. Still, we live and learn, I suppose.