nature – eternal magpie

The house has been warmed, and visited

This was our first non-work weekend in the new house (and I’m back at work again next weekend) so we wanted to take the opportunity to invite a few people round for a little party. The button heart wreath above was one of the many lovely gifts that people brought for us, and the ceramic heart inside it was a birthday present from one of my oldest friends.

Please excuse the graininess – every light bulb in the house seems to be the lowest strength available, but it seems wasteful to change them before they’ve blown. Though we might take them all out and save them to use up in a bedside lamp, which doesn’t need to be as bright as a dining room!

It was lovely to be able to show people round, and have enough space for more than two people to come and visit us at the same time! Nobody had to sit on the floor if they didn’t want to, there was space to mingle, and it was lovely to have everyone just popping in and out over the course of the afternoon. I might even brave my hermit-like tendencies, and invite people round again.

This afternoon we found ourselves with a rather more unexpected visitor. We’d just eaten lunch (in a dining room! at a dining table!) with my parents, and retired to the living room for a coffee. Paul went back into the kitchen to put the kettle on, and then started waving madly at us through the glass door because he’d discovered that there was a robin in the kitchen!

We didn’t take a photo, because the poor thing was desperate to get out of the house and had started flying into the kitchen window. So we opened the back door and gently herded him out. He must have come in through the open bedroom window, and flown all the way through the house into the kitchen!

Originally we’d planned to trim back the shrubs outside the bedroom window, because they’re bigger than they need to be for privacy, and they block out a lot of light. However, we’d already discovered that a lot of birds live in one of the bushes in particular, having been woken up several times by a blackbird and a wren at startling volume very early in the morning. So we don’t really want to destroy anybody’s habitat… but we’re obviously going to have to be a lot more careful about the windows in future!

Still struggling with the camera

Today started as a tired, sore, germy day (again!), which could easily have lapsed into watching rubbish on tv and malingering on the sofa. So I decided to take the camera for a very short walk, so I would have at least got out of the house and done something.

As you can see, I’m still really struggling to get the dratted machine to focus where I want it to. I love the picture above – two rosemary leaf beatles in the lavender in my front garden. But is is actually in focus? Anywhere? No, it is not. And this is the only picture I managed to get where the camera didn’t categorically insist on focussing on the background instead of the dratted thing right in front of the dratted lens. Read on, for more of the same.

This was supposed to be a lovely juxtaposition between the shiny arch of the padlock, and the rusted texture of the chain. What I wanted to focus on was the place where the three links overlap. Would the camera do that? No.

This one, on the other hand, came straight out of the camera first time! Lovely depth of field, focussed exactly where I wanted it. Brilliant! Would the camera do it again, so I could have a choice of shots? No.

Okay, this one I do like. I’m less bothered that the petal tip closest to the lens is out of focus, because that means you can see the texture on the inside of the petals. Who knew flowers were hairy? Now you do.

And this one – lovely. Straight out of the camera. Automatic macro mode. Focus on the water droplets. Exactly what I wanted. The camera almost had me lulled into a false sense of security…

…until it needed more than twenty shots before it would focus on this leaf, and not on the dratted trees in the background. (I may have resorted to pointing at the leaf, and hissing through clenched teeth “IT’S RIGHT THERE, YOU STUPID CAMERA”.)

And then it was fine again. Aren’t the colours in this lichen amazing?

Dear Camera, No.
Really, what were you thinking? You do seem to have tried to focus on the raindrops on this blade of grass, but sadly you have failed. Even at 2736 pixels across, I can’t work out where the point of focus is in this photo.

Thankfully this one, being almost entirely flat, was no trouble at all. Phew.

I suppose, in the great scheme of things, if all I want these photos for is to print them out at 10cm square and stick them into a scrapbook, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they’re great works of art in their own right. They’re just a means of capturing a little bit of something that I can use for inspiration later on. But in that case, why on earth did I bother to trade in two SLRs (one film, one digital) for a not-very-compact camera with a lot of manual functions, if none of them will actually do what I want? I’m beginning to wonder whether I might have been better off buying a small, cheap, very compact little camera – or maybe one of the new ones that can wirelessly synch straight to Flickr and Facebook.

As it turned out, the best part of my little walk today was something that I could never have captured on camera, and I’m very glad I didn’t try. The lake was so quiet that when I walked down onto one of the fishing bays, a Great Crested Grebe turned out to be about a foot away from me, the closest I’ve ever seen one! And as it quickly swam away, its path was crossed by the turquoise flash of a kingfisher flying right in front of it. Perfect.

Midnight scrapbooking

At the end of last week, I ordered some photos from Photobox. They had an offer on 75 photo credits for £5 + £2.99 p&p, so I took the opportunity to upload a pile of photos from Flickr and have them printed. (That offer seems to have expired now, but they have different promotions all the time.)

I have to say that the Photobox website left me extremely frustrated. The direct upload from Flickr wasn’t working, so I had to download all the photos I wanted and then upload them to Photobox. Which. Took. AGES. I resorted to uploading them in batches of 10, and it took a good couple of hours for them all to go through. And then, because my photos are square, I had to go in and manually edit each of the 75 images to centre it on a 6×4 piece of paper, rather than having them cropped, which is the default setting. If I’d realised that ahead of time, I’d have batch processed them all to 6×4 in Photoshop, which would have been much quicker.

That said, I’m really pleased with the photos themselves, and the speed of delivery. There are a few where I’ve tweaked the colours too much and they haven’t printed well, but that’s my problem not theirs. The quality of the prints overall is really nice.

Last night, in a fun-filled bout of insomnia, I sat down and trimmed the white edges away from each print, and stuck them into a folder filled with A4 sheets of sugar paper. What I want to do is use the photos for inspiration, and fill the pages with sketches based on elements from the photos. It might be shape, colour, texture… who knows.

I keep looking at online courses in “creative journalling” or “artistic sketchbooks” or “unleashing your inner artist”… that kind of thing. Trouble is, I actually know perfectly well how to do all of that stuff already. My problem isn’t so much with lack of creativity, as lack of confidence and motivation. I’m hoping that by spending time messing about in a scrapbook, making small experimental pieces that aren’t for sale – in fact aren’t “for” anything, will eventually lead me to bigger, more creative work.

Now I’m just hoping that the scrapbook itself isn’t going to turn into a lesson in not using 20 year old invisible mounts that I found in the back of a cupboard while sorting out all my old photos. I suspect they’re old enough not to be acid free, and if all the photos fall out when I pick up the folder in six months’ time, I might have to have a little cry!

A Calming Walk

This morning I was feeling particularly fibromyalgy (of course it’s a real word), and didn’t have the attention span or strength of body to carry on with my sewing. I did a few bits and bobs on the computer, but was gradually becoming more and more cross with myself for being ill. So it seemed sensible to get out, and go for a walk.

CAUTION: There is one picture of a spider in this post, a bit further down.

It was a very slow walk (half a mile in an hour and a half), but I had to keep stopping to look at small things. This fuzzy fellow is the caterpillar of the Buff Tip Moth, and he had a lot of friends who were steadily devouring a very small oak tree.

This is not an oak leaf (unhelpfully, I can’t remember what it is now), but I love the way you can see the cell structure from underneath. This is exactly the sort of thing I want to look at with my microscope, although I haven’t yet got around to either collecting a bunch of stuff to look at, or dragging my netbook around the lake with me.

I don’t know what type of spider this is, because I’m sufficiently arachnophobic that I don’t want to have to look up lots of different pictures of spiders to find out. If anyone could tell me, that would be lovely! Despite the slightly gruesome nature of the spider wrapping up its lunch (and the scariness of the spider itself), I thought this was rather a magical picture, with the web framed by leaves and little flecks of light twinkling through from the background.

One problem I am finding with this camera (Canon Powershot G12) is its general unwillingness to focus where I want it to unless it’s set entirely to automatic. Even then, it sometimes takes a bit of fiddling about. I usually take photos in Aperture Priority mode, because I like shots like this with a very shallow depth of field. Trying to combine that with macro shots though, argh, there were times when I could cheerfully have thrown the camera into the lake. And don’t even talk to me about the manual focus – that was even worse than repeatedly half-pressing the button and hoping for the best! So the vast majority of these photos were taken with the camera set to fully automatic, because I simply didn’t have the patience to fiddle.

Once again, more unidentified insects. I saw yellow spots all over the top of the leaf, and pointed the camera underneath to see what I could find. This is another one where I should have brought the leaf home with me, to check it out under the microscope! But I didn’t really want whatever those insects are to hatch out in my Shed. Or die because I’d taken the leaf off the tree.

I think this is a fragment of a pigeon’s egg. It’s very common to find them on the paths around the lake. There are A LOT of wood pigeons in the woods (unsurprisingly!), and as well as magpies and other predators finding the eggs tasty, pigeons will also push eggs out of the nest if they’re infertile. I like the way you can see the delicate cracks showing up in the membrane of this little piece.

And finally, more insect-related weirdness. The fluffy spiky things on this dog rose are moss galls, or “Robin’s pincushions”. They’re caused by a wasp laying eggs into the bud of the rose, which causes the cellular structure of the plant to change. The same thing happens to oak trees, and I know that oak galls can be used for dyeing. Apparently you can use these rose galls too, after they’ve dried out and the wasp larvae have vacated them. Not sure I’d fancy trying to collect them though – all the galls on this plant were a very long way up!

I know the weather’s turned a bit wet, but think I need to make it my mission to get outdoors and take a lot more photos. I’ve neglected my camera a lot this year, mainly thanks to spending more time at work since the spring, and then being too tired or too busy to go wandering around in the woods. I’d also like to get some actual prints made, so that I can stick them into sketchbooks and use them as inspiration for other work. Time to get uploading to Photobox I think, unless anybody’s got a recommendation for somewhere different?

Garden in the frost

I seem to be going through a phase of taking only terrible photos of my sewing (possibly because it’s so damned dark out here in the Shed), so I braved the frost yesterday and took a few pictures in the garden at work.

I’m still using my camera completely on automatic, until I can afford an update to Lightroom. Then I’ll set it to manual, start shooting RAW files, and edit away to my little heart’s content!

I’m really lucky in that the Museum of English Rural Life‘s garden is beautiful at any time of year. It’s open whenever the museum’s open, and it would be lovely if more people wanted to come and take pictures of it!

These are the same rosehips I photographed back in October – see, I didn’t pick all of them for dyeing with! Which reminds me, the ones I did pick are still sitting in the freezer, waiting for me to find the time to do something with them.

I think this is fennel, silhouetted dramatically against the sky. Well, that was the idea, anyway. I think Skycarrots’ silhouettes are much more dramatic than mine! Hers are hemlock, and they look very ethereal.

Unbelievably, there are still lots of buds on some of the rose bushes. I love the delicate pink tips of this one, and its tiny string of frosted bunting.

And last but not least, that clichéd frosty morning photo of a spiderweb! Two days of heavy hoar frost has broken most of the webs into tatters, but this particular bush was absolutely covered in them.

One of my intentions for next year is to really try and make the most of this new camera, so hopefully there’ll be a lot more photo posts coming up in 2013!

Microscope photography

As I was catching up with all of your blogs (500+ unread posts, eek!), I came across Resurrection Fern’s fascinating iPhone microscope photos. Aren’t they beautiful? I was very disappointed when a quick search revealed that the microscope gadget doesn’t fit my poor “old” iPhone 3. A bit more searching ensued, and revealed a little usb microscope for attaching to your computer. Then a penny dropped – I’ve seen one of those at work! I unearthed it from the bottom of the Science Box yesterday, and brought it home for a quick play.

So far I can say that I’m really enjoying playing with the camera, but the software leaves an awful lot to be desired! First of all, this camera is too old to be properly Mac-compatible, which is very frustrating. Not to mention the ridiculous mini-cd that houses the software, which doesn’t fit into a single computer in this house. Thankfully the computers at work are old enough to have a proper cd tray, and I was able to copy the software to a usb stick. I installed the drivers on my netbook, which was easy enough, and the camera worked straight away.

Sadly, after I’d named and saved all 30 photos individually (no batch operations, how unhelpful!), half of them wouldn’t open. The jpegs turned out to be corrupted, so they obviously hadn’t saved properly. When I got the remaining photos onto a nice large screen, I could see that most of them were out of focus, which was disappointing. The focus wheel is pretty much the entire body of the camera, which means that as you’re trying to sharpen the image you’re also moving the lens. That’s never going to work, especially not at 200x magnification!

But, the microscope + netbook combination is easily portable, which means that I’ll be able to take the whole lot outside with me and see what I can find. And the newest version of the microscope looks to have much better software and higher magnification, even though it’s still only a 2mp camera.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to give Richard Weston a run for his money, but I do have some ideas for incorporating designs inspired by these images into some new textile work. The question is, will I ever have time to make it?!

I love my new camera.

For my birthday, Paul gave me a new camera. I made the big decision to trade in both of my SLRs (an Olympus OM10 Quartz and a Canon 350D) and go for the fanciest point-and-shoot we could afford. That turned out to be a Canon G12.

I thought my old compact camera (a Pentax Optio A30) was pretty good, until it stopped talking to its batteries, but this one’s just fantastic. Its pictures in low light, its macro capabilities and its depth of colour is just lovely.

The only down side at the moment is that the RAW files won’t speak to my existing version of Adobe Lightroom, and I can’t afford to do an upgrade right now. This is particularly frustrating, as I specifically wanted a point-and-shoot camera that could create RAW files, and now I can’t use them!

So, these pictures are jpegs with minimal editing, mostly just a bit of cropping to improve the composition. Although one thing I do like about the jpeg settings on this camera is that one of them is a square format! You may have noticed that my preference is for square photographs, and it’s quite interesting taking them straight through the viewfinder rather than cropping them afterwards.

This lovely little beetle was only about 1cm long, and the lavender he’s sitting on was swaying in the breeze. My old camera would have really struggled to catch him, but the G12 managed it perfectly!

These pictures were all taken in the garden where I work. I’m really pleased with the way the autumn light and colours have come out, exactly as I saw them.

The G12 is much bigger and heavier than my old Pentax, about twice the size. But it does fit into my handbag (just about!), so I’m carrying it about with me every day. Hopefully this will result in me remembering that I can now take nice photos whenever I like, without carrying a wrist-breaking SLR. I’ll upgrade my copy of Lightroom later (perhaps Paul will buy me the upgrade for Christmas!), and then I can have a proper look at the quality of the RAW files too.

It looks as though I’m going to have a lot of experimenting to do with this camera. I think it’s going to be fun!

Dinton Pastures

Yesterday was my first weekend day off work in months that didn’t already have a plan attached to it. When the weather turned out to be nice, we decided to go for a walk to Dinton Pastures.

Everybody else seemed to have had the same idea, so we had to park miles away in the overflow car park. This turned out to be good, as we walked a corner of the park that we hadn’t really seen before.

I spent ages trying to get the perfect shot of a bee hovering on one of these flowers, but my camera wasn’t quick enough to keep up. So I had to make do with this picture of a bumble bee’s bum instead.

I came home with some souvenirs – a few photos, a touch of sunburn, and eight (at the last count) insect bites. Ouch!

So much for summer

Well, it’s the middle of July – the point of the year at which I’d usually be complaining about my Shed turning into a sauna, and my skin turning lobster-coloured.

Instead I’m sitting here in the dark, with the heater on, looking out at the rain.

So much for summer.

We’re still trying to get outside as much as we can though, dashing out for short walks between the rain showers.

Just as we were heading home last night, we saw two foxes in the fields. My camera couldn’t manage to catch them in the twilight, but it was lovely to watch them for a while.

Summer Walk

It finally felt a little bit like summer, for about an hour at lunchtime today. I’ve been ill for most of this week, and cooped up indoors, so I thought I’d brave a little walk.

The hydrangea above, and these poppies, are in the garden of my local church. It’s a brand new building with a brand new garden, but a few small plants are finally starting to establish themselves.

I do love my little camera. It’s a Pentax Optio A30, about five years old, and it took this picture all by itself, on the super macro setting. The only post-processing I did was to crop the image into a square.

Sadly it’s just about on its last legs (it’s terrible in low light, and barely speaking to the batteries), which means I’m going to have to replace it. I’m not looking forward to that, partly because I can’t afford a new camera, and partly because this one’s been so lovely that I’m completely spoiled by it.

This hogweed (I think!) grows at the side of the path down to the underpass.

It gives me ideas for silver clay jewellery, with this lovely sculptural shape pressed into a pendant. Or perhaps a lovely embroidery, with the buds made up of french knots.

These cornflowers have both appeared in my front garden. Who knew you could have white cornflowers? The only ones I’ve ever known have been blue. I sowed three mixed packets of wildflower seeds, and this is the only little patch that’s come up. A square foot of daisies and cornflowers amongst the thyme.

Hopefully they’ll seed themselves, so that next year we have a front garden full of these little gems.

Tag: nature

The house has been warmed, and visited

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Still struggling with the camera

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Midnight scrapbooking

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A Calming Walk

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Garden in the frost

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Microscope photography

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I love my new camera.

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Dinton Pastures

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So much for summer

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Summer Walk

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