Dreaming Spirals

I saw this rather strange sculpture outside the castle:

And this old fountain….

Nature added its bit to the arty element too…

And I love the juxtaposition of the crack, the manmade groove and the lichen on this stone on the old bridge:

I have been observing the reeds in Newport recently through the seasons. Today I went for a walk and took lots of photos and the following video… I love the sounds it picks up and the way they look just like waves…

A week or so ago, we had a heatwave here, and then at the weekend a rather spectacular thunderstorm.  It caused quite a lake on our patio:

I’m glad that the patio slopes away from the house because it was getting ever deeper! 

The ever growing beans seem to have held up against it, though!

Pity about the redundant hosepipe and water jug – they seem a bit incongruous!  As you can see, though, the beans and tomatoes are growing apace and I looked today and there are several tomatoes on there.  Plenty of bean flowers though no beans yet to be seen…

While we were away at Easter, I saw lots of crows and seagulls.  I think they were attracted by all the food scraps around, but I took the opportunity to get a bit closer than usual.  Crows, especially, seem to be particularly suspicious and will fly away as soon as you get close enough to take a picture with more than a black dot in it! 

This crow’s profile looks quite scary

But from a distance it’s not so bad…

This seagull looks quite at home in an urban environment…

And I quite like the effect of this one.  It would be better with a total background of blue sky though. 

And I include this because I like the effect of footprints in the sand:

Over Easter we stayed in Minehead in Somerset.  It was glorious weather and one afternoon I decided to walk to Dunster, a few miles away.  I walked along the coast and past the golf course (taking care to listen for shouts of ‘Fore!’) and then turned inland. 

Here is Dunster railway station, where trains from the West Somerset Railway stop.  I didn’t see any trains, unfortunately, but heard them in the distance.

There was a big hill up to Dunster village itself but I trudged along and eventually came to the main street.  Didn’t have time to visit the castle, unfortunately, but I saw this old yarn market where they used to sell yarn in medieval times:

Isn’t it gorgeous?  I love the roof timbers:

I had a wander round the shops, very touristy but some lovely arty things in them, and then wended my way back along the coast again, fortified by a yummy ice cream…

Back through the fields where the lambs were capering…. there were rooks or crows nesting in those trees in the background and they had plenty to say to each other in VERY loud voices!

I saw lots of angelica (I think it was angelica, anyway, it looked similar to what I grew a couple of years ago) growing wild:

One night there was a gorgeous sunset – I tested the sunset setting on my camera and I think it turned out pretty well!

I’ve been working through some of the exercises in Finding your Visual Language by Claire Benn, Leslie Morgan and Jane Dunnewold.  One of them is to take lots of photos, paying attention to the possibilities for design, and they suggest going out and taking a whole series just of shadows.  So I did this last week, the first sunny day in ages when there actually WERE shadows…

Oh dear, there’s my shadow as well!

As you can see, I’m drawn mostly to tree shadows (and, to be honest, they were the only interesting shadows around, mostly….).

At least this one has a streetlamp in it as well.

I had fun with this one when I got back.  I used Irfanview, that brilliant free photo programme which I usually just use for resizing photos.  I cropped it, set it to greyscale, made it into a negative image and then got this by clicking on ‘Image > Effects > Effects Browser > Metallic Gold.  And here’s the result:

Cool, eh?  I could see this as a gocco print….

I did the same thing with this photo:

Here it is – I actually turned it upside down as well….

And while I was trying out how I did it in Irfanview so I could write it down for this post , I tried it with a random transfer paint design and that turned out fun as well:

Do you remember this circles rubbing from the post about transfer paints I did a few weeks ago?  What amazing things you can do with photos these days!   Hmm… got a feeling that effect might get used a lot in the future….