photos – eternal magpie

Walk in the woods.

My mind’s been full of bees, lately.

Busy. Buzzy. Noisy. Distracted.

The only thing for it was to go for a walk.

I borrowed Paul’s little Lumix camera, and made my way down to Oldpond Copse, the piece of woodland next to our old house. I’ve missed coming here.

It’s not far away – just a 15 minute walk from the new place – but that seems a lot, compared with being able to step out of the old house and be in a little field almost immediately. We do have a huge garden now, but that’s nowhere close to being the sanctuary I need it to be. We have a park too, but it’s small and surrounded by houses. I knew I missed the lake, but I hadn’t quite realised how much I needed this little patch of trees.

This is where we had our engagement photos taken. I think the photographer was a bit surprised when we took him to a gap in the hedge and led him down the steps, but the photos he took that day are the nicest ones we have. (Nicer than the wedding photos, even.)

I love the way that you can really feel alone here. Despite the dog-walkers, local walking club, “Erlegh Elfins” kindergarten, fishermen at the lake, and the countless other people that use this space, it’s a really good spot to go for thinking. Listening. Watching the birds and the squirrels. Getting to know the trees. Really looking, to see how it’s changed since you were last there.

The little stream was slow and shallow today. I was able to climb across it to capture this little feather. All of an inch deep, the water could barely be bothered to move.

I love all of the different elements in this one, all mixed up together. The earth underneath the water. The sky reflected below the feather. Everything slow, and gentle.

Even though I know that these steps lead up to a sports field, the light at the top always seems to make them feel magical. As though you could climb up, and come out in a different place every time. I can’t remember what the sign says, probably something about keeping your dog on a lead (which nobody does), or not riding your bike through the woodland. I like to think it says “Narnia” or “Wall” or maybe “Keep Out”, depending on who’s looking at it.

This was the only fungus I managed to capture in focus, but there were plenty of them around. There was a huge great chicken of the woods, sadly trampled underfoot, and lots of things I didn’t recognise – including this. It looks so beautiful on the trunk of this dead silver birch tree, as though it couldn’t possibly have grown anywhere but here.

The lake was busy with people today, so I didn’t stop for long. Just long enough to notice the fluffiest feather I think I’ve ever seen.

On my way back through the Real World, I noticed a stunning garden filled to bursting with dahlias – an absolute shock of colour in an otherwise nowhere street. I popped into the local shop on the way past (soon to be usurped by a horrible new Tesco that’s taking up residence in what used to be the local pub), and bought a knitting magazine full of potential Christmas gifts. I think that might take up the rest of my day now. A bit of laundry, a bit of cleaning, and a lot of knitting, to try and keep my head in the space that the copse has cleared for it.

Playing with Kuler

This is a screenshot from the Adobe Kuler app on my phone.

I’d read about it on the Spoonflower blog, back in August. They sometimes run design challenges requiring a limited colour palette, and this particular one was run in conjunction with Adobe.

You point Kuler at a photo, and it picks out a selection of compatible colours for you. (You can also start from scratch, with a colour wheel, but that’s not really the part I’m interested in.) You can choose from five pre-set moods, or you can choose your own set of colours directly from the image.

I was thinking about the photographs I stuck in a scrapbook the other week, and wondered whether pasting the colour charts into the empty space left by a square image on a 6×4″ print would be a worthwhile thing to do.

Looking at this image, I’m not sure. Sticking all five colour charts together like this makes it harder to see the subtle differences between them, and I think I much prefer the phone screenshot, where you can just see the one.

I do wish there was a better way of saving the colour chart alongside the original photo. The ones from my phone are screenshots taken before I pressed the tick to save the colours. Once you’ve done that, the photo goes away, and you’re left with just the chart.

From the website you can download the colour charts as .ase files which you can import into Photoshop’s swatch panel, which is very useful, and it will also show you the rgb and hex codes for the individual colours. But again, once you’ve chosen your colours and clicked save, the original image is lost. Screenshots it is then, I suppose!

Mind you, as evidenced by the shield bug above, the original photo doesn’t have to be well-composed or even slightly in focus in order for the app to work! You can also use the phone’s camera to pick colours from life, without having to use a saved image.

All of this is making me yearn for a better camera/phone hybrid though. My iPhone is a 3gs, which is quite old now, so the camera’s not all that great. The one I keep seeing advertised is the Samsung Galaxy S4, which runs on Android. If all the apps I currently use on my phone (not that many, it has to be said) could be run on this, then I might be inclined to make the switch. Not that I can afford it right now… but for a truly compact camera, that can take quick snaps and upload them on the fly, this might be the way forward for me.

(Although even just typing that sentence is making me miss my SLR. I am nothing if not fickle.)

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?

Silk bloomers & Fairysteps…

You remember the silk bloomers I made yesterday?

This is what happened when we went outside to take some photos of them.

I’m sure the local dog-walkers thought we were bonkers!

Thanks to Fairysteps for the gold boots and leather top, and of course to Paul for patiently taking dozens of photos, most of which I pulled a face at. (Or in.) I am not confident having my photo taken, or trying to climb a tree!

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!

Hop pillows

25 hop pillows, waiting for the ends to be sewn together by hand…

Just doing a little experiment with short-and-sweet Instagram posts on the blog, in between the “real” ones. We’ll see how it goes!

Hops and Walks

This morning I have been mostly separating dried hop flowers from their stalks. I found out the hard way that hop flowers contain a great deal of pollen, which is very sticky and dyes your fingers bright yellow. Apparently the stems can also be an irritant, so I’ll definitely be wearing gloves next time!

The hops were harvested by Sarah from the Skycarrots allotment, and now that they’ve dried, they’re destined for little hop pillows. I’ve made the insides for nine already, and should be able to double that with this crop.

I didn’t want to show you the unfinished hop pillows, lying around in their underwear, so more photos will come once I’ve sewn up the outer bags. So, in the meantime, I thought I’d show you a couple of random photos I’ve taken on recent walks.

Here’s a cat, who I often meet on the way to the Post Office. The trees that he usually hides amongst have been recently chopped down, so he was watching the squirrels from this excellent vantage point on top of a fence.

This is what the University campus looked like at 5pm last Wednesday. I came out of the Cole Museum to see this amazing sky, and thoroughly confused a number of students by stopping to take a photo of it.

I’m really enjoying having a camera with me at all times. Fingers crossed I’ll be able to afford a new copy of Lightroom soon, so I can get back to using RAW files with a bit more room for editing. Still loving the automatic square format though. I know it’s just an affectation, but there’s something about it that I really like.

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?!

Tag: photos

Walk in the woods.

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Playing with Kuler

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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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Silk bloomers & Fairysteps…

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Garden in the frost

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Hop pillows

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Hops and Walks

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Microscope photography

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