Monthly Archives: September 2018

Sep 24 2018
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Into The Woods

Into The Woods

Into The Woods

Happy Autumn everyone! This image was taken on the edges of Horsell Common, in the woodland next to the wheelchair accessible pathway. How I wish more of the countryside had better access and provision for wheelchair users and those with restricted mobility! The access that has been put in around several areas of the Common shows that it is possible to do, without having any negative impacts on the landscape, wildlife or natural feel of the environment. Our beautiful countryside really should be open and available to all! I would have loved to go traipsing off through the burnished bracken into the birches with the ghostly trunks and golden canopy but I am a realist! Some things cannot be made possible, but I thank The Horsell Common Preservation Society and Woking Borough for enabling me to access this scene, allowing my mind to wander where my legs no longer can.

Sep 24 2018
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ShareMondays2018 – Ghosts And Echoes

Ghosts

ShareMondays2018 – Ghosts And Echoes

Ghosts: A colourised, black and white image of seed-pods ghosting among the grasses at Heather Farm Wetlands Centre. I loved the way they moved in the breeze, seemingly detached from the rest of the plant. The scene called to my memories of black and white film photography and experimenting in the darkroom. As I looked through the lens I could see high key, stained and etched, showing the pods off like fireworks or bursting stars. Really happy with the end result!

Echoes: One of the things that I loved doing in the darkroom was multiple exposures, either from one negative, or several, to create my art. Echoes was created from three exposures, one with more contrast and two slightly offset exposures that shifted the focal point of the subjects. This image is a homage to the way I used to work in film, now created using digital processing. Digital doesn’t dilute the origins of creative photography, it has provided me a way to recreate darkroom processes as well as opening up so many more ways to be creative with post processing in colour as well as black and white.

Echoes

Ghosts and Echoes are a memory of the past, a celebration of the present and excitement for the future of the photographic process.

Sep 17 2018
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Blooming Butterflies

Blooming Butterflies

Blooming Butterflies

There were so many small copper and common blue butterflies still on the wing last week at Heather Farm Wetlands Centre, a part of Horsell Common. They’re not hard to find either, you just have to look around the clumps of this yellow flowering plant, called common fleabane. It’s been practically blooming butterflies throughout the season! Can’t resist putting this in for this week’s WexMondays challenge. Lovely to be out chasing so many butterflies in the middle of September!

Sep 17 2018
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Blue Monday : Banquet For Blue Tits

Banquet For Blue Tits

Blue Monday : Banquet For Blue Tits

The bountiful berries of the Cornus kousa, a flowering dogwood, make a fine banquet for the diminutive blue tits in the Autumn. It’s a feast for the eyes to watch them! There are a number of kousa trees around the grounds at RHS Wisley Gardens, but the best fruiting and most visited ones are just at the bottom of the rose garden. While other birds have to forage below the trees for fallen fruit, the blue tit appears to be the only visitor light enough to feed directly from the fruit ripening on the tree. Occasionally even these lightweights accidentally pick a berry that can’t quite support them and they tumble down through the leaves. I’m yet to catch that amusing sight on camera! My lead image really captures how adept they are at feeding from the berries, so I’m entering it into today’s ShareMondays2018 and Fotospeed challenges. I’ll keep on trying to photograph one their epic fails!