Garden abstracts

We had another lovely sunny spring weekend and whilst the warm weather makes it feel summery - it's still rather too early to plant summer annuals. Consequently, whilst I'm out in the garden working on it and getting some much needed fresh air and sunshine, there still isn't that much to see - and certainly not much colour - and it looks a tad barren at the moment. I do however grow quite a lot of greenery to keep it looking interesting even without flowers, so I decided to enjoy that for what it was and not worry about the lack of flowers.

Please click on any of the photographs to see a larger view.

I have one spectacular potted hosta that has lovely variegated leaves and it is just opening up - the bits that the snails haven't already consumed are opening in lovely tight spirals.

I kept coming back to the same leaves as the light changed, totally besotted with the lovely shapes and lines.

The textures of the greenery do tend to give rise to some lovely abstracts and textures and that was what I focused on for my garden photography this weekend.

Newly opening ivy leaves which are seemingly quite hairy as they uncurl.

I often do this when out on my lunchtime walk or if the weather isn't good - I pick a theme or subject and concentrate on looking for images to fit that theme - it's good for making you look at things differently and even in limited locations (i.e. my postage stamp sized garden or the familiar walk to the next village) and poor weather, means there's much more to see that you initially think - once you attune your eyes to seeing them.

Not all my foliage is green - my Japanese maple opens with these scrawny thin red leaves that gradually fill out - red at first, turning green as they mature.

I might pick a theme like shadows, reflections, texture etc. and only take photographs that fit this theme - on other occasions I might limit myself to a particular fixed focal length lens or camera mode. It's very liberating to work this way - and good for finding something interesting when in a creative funk like I am at present. Who needs flowers with all this lovely texture and interest in the foliage.

A long growing tendril from my honeysuckle - it's an evergreen, but like everything else in the garden, it starts growing again with gusto once we get some sunshine and longer days.

I like variegated foliage for additional interest.

Some new opening foliage on alpine strawberry plants - making a lovely carpet of texture.

This bud will open out into tiny red and white candy-striped flowers.

The only thing this monkey puzzle is good for is taking photos of - if you lean against it or brush past it it slices you like a razor blade, falling leaves get totally ensnared in the spikes and need removing with surgical precision and protective gear.

An advance taster of summer to come

Here in the UK over the last few days we've had glorious warm sunny weather. Spring has well and truly arrived with the bonus of some unseasonably early warmth. I even managed to get several loads of washing dried outside and put away the same day.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.

I have collected lots of interesting pieces of driftwood and bought a bag of large pebbles to scatter around and I love the textural interest they provide in the garden even when nothing much is growing.

It was actually slightly odd to be outside in shirt sleeves, yet be able to see trees that were still bare. But that in itself has now changed, 4 days of sunshine and everything has erupted. That gorgeous new spring green foliage that positively glows in the sunlight.

I have a small corkscrew hazel in a pot and the 'lambs tail' flowers emerge before the foliage, which just emerged with the lovely sunshine we just had.

I love this time of year with the promise of summer ahead but with everything still emerging - lovely pristine foliage in fresh perfect colour, before weather, disease and insects take their toll over the summer months.

I have a large feature hosta in a tall glazed pot which looks stunning until the snails find it. It starts off as purple spikes which gradually unfurl the stripey leaves. I didn't spot this family of greenfly until I looked at the photos.

One of the big advantages of being self-employed and working from home is that I can choose when and where to work - for the most part. Clearly work demands take priority if I'm to keep happy customers, but I do love the warmer weather (shirt-sleeve warm, preferably not hot) when I can work with the back door open and potter in and out of the garden to do work outside when it's possible. I have a favourite bench in the shade that I love to sit at and work. It has been warm enough over the last few days to be able to do that and I was actually remarkably productive.

We even had bees busy at work collecting pollen and making the garden sound summery as well as feel it.

I had several pieces of wire wrapped work that I wanted to replace in my stock and several part finished pieces that needed hand polishing and I got through all of it over the weekend in rests between vigorous garden work - like stripping back a lot of the ivy that grows up the outside of the house. We tend to trim it right back, rather like a severe hair cut and it will re-grow rampantly over summer and still more over winter, ready to be curtailed again next spring. It's a messy, dusty job that we both hate, but always want to get done before we plant the summer annuals as the process drops hundreds of loose leaves in the garden.

I bought two phlox plants last summer that looked stunning when I planted them, but the first flush of flowers finished and they never seemed to get more than the odd further one. I was surprised to see that not only had they survived the hard winter, but were positively thriving. They've gone from tight buds, that I hoped were flowers, to full of these delicate flowers in a matter of days. I love how they uncurl as they open.

I do however have to share my garden. We have a very steep pitched roof which overhangs the house rather more than most houses, giving rise to deep eaves which provide good shelter for nesting birds and each spring and summer we have a whole neighbourhood of nesting house sparrows coming and going under the eaves and into holes where the roof crosses the stone walls. They seem to squeeze themselves through implausibly small holes and vanish out of sight.

For the most part, the sparrows don't mind us being in the garden, they seem to accept that we're going to be there but don't interfere with them and we happily share the space - I'm happy to do so as they're in serious decline and I enjoy being close to them. As the sparrows raise their families, we often get baby birds dropping from the nests when they're fledging and on more than one occasion, one has dropped down the drainpipe from perching on the guttering and we've had to take a section out of the drainpipe to release the trapped baby where they get stuck near a bend in the pipe.

I pointed out that as he wasn't paying rent and I fed him too, he might exercise a little more control over his manners.

But sparrows are pretty vocal, especially when a few gather and they sound like they're having heated discussions. I don't know if they're trying to chase us off, just let us know they're there, or just are chatting. So we often have individual birds that seem more vocal than others and make a big fuss as they come and go. The bird in the photos was one such 2011 resident. Every time he arrived or left, he sang loudly and very pointedly looked at me as he perched inside his own particular front door a few feet above me. Several times he hopped over to a length of the telephone cable coming into the house and would look down at me, very pointedly and loudly having his say.

The lovely weather gave me the opportunity to sit and do some wire wrapping and to polish several pieces in progress. There was a distinct 'heart' theme to my work this weekend, I made several pendants this shape in both copper and Sterling silver and the matching earrings are just waiting to be antiqued. I also finished a series of antiqued copper earrings featuring squiggled infills wrapped to a frame with Sterling silver. The oval pair were for a commission and I made the teardrop pairs at the same time to make available in the shop.

Revisiting my image processing workflow

As I've mentioned before, I was kindly given a new camera for a big birthday I had in January and have spent some time since getting to know it. Despite being a very long term photographer with a lot of experience of different cameras, it's been rather a steep learning curve with this particular one.

I've had to work on how to get the best of it when actually taking photographs - and that's something I still haven't settled on yet - every time I think I've mastered what's required, a series of photographs disproves my earlier conclusions and it's back to the drawing board. I've never had a dilemma quite like this before with any camera.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view, they tend to look rather dark here on the page.

A recent image with the new camera taken on a very cold and grey day - which didn't quite work when I took it, but some extra saturation and a different sharpening technique brought much more out of it.

Some of the problem stems from the fact that I like to work with RAW format images, that is, the camera records the data of the photograph without finally processing it into an actual image - you download the file to the computer, then use software to make that final conversion. The idea being that your computer, coupled with your own knowledge and hopes for the photograph, combined with the luxury of time and sophisticated software, can do a better job of it than the camera can in the milliseconds it has to process the image for you.

I was tinkering with my 720mm equivalent lens on my lunchtime walk and this chap thought I needed investigating and came over for a closer look - at the time he was the other side of the field.

The camera itself is restricted to the recipe of image processing algorithms that are preset between the camera manufacturers taste and the settings you chose in the camera - like saturation level, in-camera sharpening etc. That becomes a sort of one-shot deal - once the moment has passed, that image has been recorded within those constraints and whilst you can post-process it later to quite a large degree, some aspects of it may be beyond retrieval.

The daffodils outside the house are at their most perfect at the moment and the patch of them gets the last dying rays of the sun as it sets behind buildings opposite and gives them a lovely evening glow.

So working with a RAW format gives you a second chance to wrangle a better image from the data you recorded when not constrained by the camera processing. It also gives you an opportunity to develop more than one version of an image and merge the best from each - this is a practice I especially like to do, predominantly with landscapes, which have a lot of contrast in the scene - if you get dark areas under trees well exposed for example, this might leave the sky too pale and you might blow the highlights of white clouds or reflections from water. In the past you might have done this with bracketed exposures taken at the same time, but this needs a tripod and still conditions to work well.

This image could not have been achieved, as it looks here, from a single in-camera JPEG - I developed two versions from the RAW file - one to expose for the distant hillside in full sun and another for the dark foreground areas in deep shadow. I manually blended them to get the best from each exposure.

You can blend separately developed images from the RAW file for colour as well as exposure - in this interior I did for a client recently, the grey tiles under the cupboard had a different colour cast from the rest of the room and were over exposed too due to the proximity of the lights - but I could blend the best of two versions of the image to get a natural looking result, more in line with what your eye and brain are capable of interpreting at the time.

You do of course see an image in the camera as you work with RAW files, as usually a small format JPEG is recorded at the same time as the RAW file is saved and embedded within it, otherwise you couldn't view your photos back in the camera or preview and identify them on your computer.

An image that I never did get to look quite how I wanted and in line with how the scene was, but some work on it retrospectively gave the result I had been after. Sometimes revisiting such images later with fresh eyes gives better results.

With my DSLRs I've always chosen to work with a RAW format and had a good workflow for doing so - I thought any extra time that process took (and I'm not convinced that it actually did) was more than repaid in better results. I got into good habits early on and didn't actually find the process tiresome, as many often cite as a reason for NOT shooting RAW. I preview my photographs (i.e looking at the embedded JPEGs just mentioned) in image viewing software and choose the ones I want to look at in more detail, then move to the RAW development software and only work on the ones I've already shortlisted - I certainly don't develop all of the images I take in a RAW format and often, the embedded JPEG is good enough for many uses.

What's not to love about sleepy piggies - another older image revisited with the revised workflow which gives a result more like what I saw and wanted from it.

And this is where my difficulties stem from with this camera. It has the ability to shoot RAW which was a big tick in the plus column when initially choosing the model. But, the particular file format is not well supported by many of the main RAW development softwares and those that do, won't work on my now old and insufficiently specced computer or they cost lots of pennies - and still won't work on my old computer. It does of course come bundled with a suitable application - but it's very much a stripped down 'lite' version without many of the functions I would consider essential - although they tantalisingly leave them visible but greyed out to add to the frustration. It's also very slow and a resource hog on my poor tired old computer. Plus, I simply don't like it very much. I really like the application I use with my DSLR images and that has spoiled me somewhat.

The scene at the top of the hill on one of my lunchtime walk routes. By the time I reach this point I tend to be gasping and panting and happy to just stop a moment and enjoy this scene.

So I'm currently having a battle between short term ease of use at the moment and better potential image quality - complicated by the likelihood that I will hopefully get a new computer in the not-too-distant and then I would be able to revisit images I've already taken more easily. So, for today at least, I'm just shooting JPEGs and as soon as I take an image that needs something more than I recorded, regret not having a RAW image to tweak. I'll certainly change my mind again next week; I'm already on 'Plan J'.

This is an image I've no doubt posted before, but as it's typical of the type of scene I can't resist, it was important to me to hone a methodology for both taking images like this and for post-processing them, to get results I liked. I finally got this one to look how I envisaged it.

But all this contemplation has caused me to revisit my image workflow too - perhaps a task that was long overdue. With the need to produce jewellery images very quickly and efficiently, I developed a workflow for them specifically and set up scripts for functions like sharpening, that gave decent quick and dirty results. These worked well enough for the web based jewellery images, so I got into lazy habits and started using the same workflow for all of my images. But this didn't seem to work quite as well with images from my new camera, so I decided to go back to basics and work through my original more thorough workflow for my 'leisure images' and see if I could hone a new workflow that could be made just as efficient and hopefully give better results.

I can't resist the abstract shapes and colours of fungi and this was taken on one of my favourite walks in the Lake District that in autumn has a diverse range of fungi growing amongst the trees.

I always used to enjoy tinkering with images to get the best possible result from them, but the need to bang out jewellery photos in volume as efficiently as possible had somewhat spoiled that process for me, but looking at it more carefully again, the bug re-bit me and I think I've now settled on a processing routine that will work well with my new camera images, but can also be applied to all of my other images too as I've honed some scripts that use the best of both workflows.

I'd forgotten about this particular version of my woodland chum - I'd taken it from down the hill, but with a long focal length to give that feeling of a low perspective and him slithering between the trees. Imagine if you bumped into that in the dark without knowing it was there.

So armed with my re-awakened enthusiasm, I picked some older photos at random and re-worked them, just to see if my new ideas had merit across a range of images from different cameras, some of which are posted above.

This was taken on a damp drizzly and cold August day and I wanted to try and re-capture that misty glow that the scene had with all the moisture in the air.

Time to grab my camera and head out for some fresh air whilst it's nice - now what settings was I supposed to be trying today . . . ?

Mother Nature knows how to cheer us up

I apologise for yet another blog lacking in worthy literary content. I have been working and concentrating on other things recently and need to get back to my usual routine and thought processes and get some of the draft tutorials I have in the works actually finished. So in the short term, I'm going to fob you off with some photographs and hope it serves as a suitable distraction from the lack of actual information.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.

There is a dense patch of tiny tete-a-tete daffodils in the corner of the park - how could that fail to lift your spirits.

I've always had the idea that Mother Nature knows everyone is a bit fed up after winter and in need of something cheering and she came up with daffodils. Isn't she clever?

It was a totally gorgeous spring day today - wall to wall sunshine (well, almost; the scant clouds always seem to know just when I've got myself into a preposterous position to take a photograph), deep blue sky and whilst the air was decidedly nippy and the breeze quite brisk, the sun was warm and I could hardly wait today to finish some tasks I needed to, so I could grab my hiking boots and head out for my lunchtime walk.

One thing leads to another - I stepped towards the railings along the river to see if there were any nice views to be had and as I looked carefully where I was standing to prevent me crushing any plants coming through the leaf litter, I saw a little cluster of small brown fungi - the structure of the gills is quite beautiful and clearly arranged in patterns of ascending size - you needed to get low to appreciate the structure, the photograph was taken on the ground. It was only around 25mm (1") in diameter and the same sort of height. Whilst I'm bending down taking photos, I spotted my gnarled root photo prop.

I believe this fungi to be a Winter Twiglet - Tubaria hiemalis - apparently there are few traditional mushroom shaped fungi this early in the year and it certainly has the gill patterns which would identify the species.

That makes it sound like I scaled some strenuous peak, where in reality I walked a loop to the next village, tickled a cat, threw sticks for a gorgeous auburn coloured boxer dog, caught up on the family gossip with an old friend out tending her horse, took some photos and found a fabulous bit of dried gnarled root for a photo prop. As previously mentioned, I always have a tie handle bag in my pocket for the collection of such treasures. Dangling from my camera bag it must make passers-by wonder where I lost my dog, but I care not.

The house that faces this view is currently up for sale. I've looked at it a couple of times when it's changed hands over the years, but I don't think my pockets are anything like deep enough.

As I headed back, I got the flashing red icon to indicate that my camera batteries were going. I had spares with me, but didn't want to bother trying to change them with cold fingers and without my glasses to see which way in they go. I managed to squeak a couple more out of these primroses.

I really should have made more progress on my to do list, but tickling cats, talking to boxers and old friends and sharing my day with pretty fungi, daffodils and primroses was far more agreeable. I can work when it's dark.

What on earth are they doing?

Maybe you can help to educate me - I saw these chickens at a farm shop recently and was perplexed by their actions. There was a dusty hollow in some dry earth in the shadow of a wall and the chickens were taking it in turns to 'bathe' in the dust. That much I can comprehend, but after some fluttering action, they would lie perfectly still for a while as though in total ecstasy, with their heads on their side. Then jump up and saunter off, like the white one who was clearly 'done'.

I was tickled that the white chicken standing has markings on its side like a boot print. I sincerely hope that is is just patterns on the feathers.

Fresh air, peace and quiet - just how we like it!

As regular readers will know, I am totally besotted with the English Lake District and spend as much time there as bank balances and work schedules will allow. We weren't expecting to spend any time there until our regular Easter holiday but a lovely opportunity to do some photography work up there, as a return favour I owed someone, came out of the blue and at short notice, but it didn't take much effort for me to be persuaded.

Between the work I had to do we did manage some quality time in some of our favourite places and that was a real bonus. The weather was decent enough for February too, so we managed a couple of nice walks and to gawp into our favourite patches of trees. It was incredibly quiet - just how we like it - and we haven't had a winter break up there for some time and it was different to see it with bare trees, we saw all sorts of things normally obscured by foliage that we've not spotted before. I've had a run of health issues recently and the fresh air, peace and exercise did me a world of good and despite the work I still need to do finishing the project, was very well worth doing.

I'll just leave you with the odd assortment of distinctly average photos I took over the weekend. If anyone sees my photography mojo, will they please pop a stamp on it and drop it in a letterbox back to me - I'd really rather like it back. I'm not even sure where I had it last.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.

One of our favourite walks along Windermere starts along the lake side. There was a sailing race taking place at the time - I couldn't fathom what was going on - it looked incredibly confusing, but looked like a perfect day for it with the colourful spinnakers billowing.

I hope that they know where they're going!

Once the race had finished it went very quiet on the lake. All you could hear was birds and the occasional creaking tree in the breeze. I always kick through the leaf and timber detritus at the water edge and this is where I get most of my driftwood pieces as photography props and I picked up a beauty. I always carry a tie handle plastic bag with me for collecting such 'treasures'.

It's a relatively recent practice in managed woodlands to allow fallen trees to stay where they fall (unless there is a safety hazard) and for the natural ecology of the woodland to take over. I love to see how many things take up residence on logs like this. It becomes a fascinating little world all of its own.

I love the abstract design and textures of fungi, mosses and lichens, they're worth getting a close look at them, they're often complex and fascinating structures.


It was a bit muddy underfoot, but with the peace, sunlight through the trees, lack of people and abundant fresh air, it was just about perfect.

This photograph was somewhat about 'the one that got away' - it had been preceded a few minutes earlier by a passing over of the incredibly fast, loud and flying vertically on its wing-tips, Typhoon Euro-fighter - I've seen them in this spot over Thirlmere many times, but by the time you hear them, they're almost out of sight. It was so loud Mr Boo actually swerved the car and we both ducked, although I have no idea why instinct should make you think that would help in the circumstances. Thankfully, this transport helicopter a few minutes later was going at a slightly more sedate pace. What a fabulous way to visit the Lakes. I stuck out my thumb but they weren't for stopping. Note the heat from the exhausts blurring the trees behind.

The last dying colours as the sun sets behind Thirlmere

I love the colours of beech woodland; at any time of year.

We woke on Tuesday to a perfect clear deep blue sky and deep frost. As some of the work I had to do included exterior shots, I got out early to do them while the sky was so perfect and the undisturbed foliage where the sun hadn't yet reached was dusted with delicate ice crystals - even the hairs on the stalks are frosty.