Or not, depending on my mood
These harvested potatoes are certainly very new – the red machine is picking them straight out of the ground, and the yellow elevator passes them over into one of ten waiting wooden boxes on the trailer alongside. Images taken from our bedroom window at my parent’s house in the North of Scotland 🙂
Photo A Week Challenge: Something New
So Fandango’s One Word Challenge today is ‘Movement’, and I decided to go out for a walk with my camera to see if I could capture any movement – it still feels odd having spent years teaching myself how not to have camera shake or fuzzy movement, to then deliberately create it in a shot. I was initially thinking people, or cars, or buses zooming along the road. But it’s hot and sunny and bright and not really long exposure weather, and anyway as I’ve never really got the hang of sucessfully using my ND filter I gave up on that idea.
Instead I went for a walk in the local woods, where there’s always a bit of shade to be had, lots of dark and light, and played about for a bit experimenting in taking oddly moving pictures of trees – obviously the trees don’t move, but with the right settings a bit of camera trickery can provide the motion! Aperture priority, aperture closed down ( experimenting with different levels), ISO fixed at 160 (lowest my camera can do), and plenty of deliberate camera movement on my part.
To start with I tried my usual zoom bursts, holding the camera steady and zooming the lens from wide to tele, but they looked quite boring; then I tried holding the lens steady and moving the camera instead; then moving the entire camera and lens in a circle; then up and down; then back and forth; and finally in any odd shape I fancied. Overall I tried minimal abstraction (so the grass and trees are still reasonably recognisable), maximum abstraction (where it’s all just random green fuzz) and an in between, neither-one-nor-the-other kind of melting-forest dream-state effect.
I took loads, so here are some of my favourites in all three categories:
Slight movement…
Melting Forest…
Completely abstract…
So altogether I’ve ended up with some very different views of my usual walk through the woods, and perhaps cheekily have also created a rather different take on Nancy’s Photo A Week Challenge prompt of ‘View’ – what fun I’ve had with this today! 🙂
I love the way the natural curvy flowing lines of the brightly coloured flowers and leaves contrast so completely with the rigid man-made geometric shapes of the blacks and whites and neutrals making up the rest of the shot 🙂
Nancy’s Photo a Week Challenge this week has the theme of ‘urban’ – and for me, London’s Underground trains are as urban as you get. Luckily for me I found myself travelling out of town aganst the rush-hour traffic last Thursday morning, flowing outwards towards freedom instead of funneling myself with fathomless futility into the crushing confines of the train carriage. Anyway, to my surprise and delight I managed to capture some reasonably clear-of-commuters-playing-sardines shots on my smartphone, from both outside and inside of a tube train 🙂
Luckily, I’d just finished colouring in a circular ocean design on a square page when Nancy thoughtfully posted her Photo A Week Challenge with the topic of Circles and Squares – woo-hoo, immediately sorted for that one! And amazingly, just as I was busily preparing my post Linda helpfully posted her Friday Prompt for our Stream of Consciousness Saturday post on the topic of adverbs – so I quickly decided I could easily adapt my post to sneakily accommodate a few adverbs within the body of my text, and hey presto, here we are! Impressively for me, I’m even posting early – but I guess surely it’s already got to be Saturday somewhere in the world? 🙂
To have such spectacular wildflowers growing so comfortably within a big city is often a surprise to many people, residents and visitors alike, but here are this year’s beautiful bluebells flowering in Chalet Wood, Wanstead Park, East London. Some years they come slightly earlier, and some years they come a bit later, but their breath-taking abundance every spring never fails to make me smile 🙂
Three views of the great outdoors taken here in Wanstead Flats, Leytonstone, East London – even in a big city like London, we still have our own little oasis of open space to let us spend time in nature 🙂
