Bokeh is a photographic terms for an object caught in a sharp focus and light, while the background is in soft focus. I was working to try and achieve that with this flower, the contrasting colours of the flower and background, and the strong, beautiful sunlight that day all helped.
This week I knew I had my (hopefully) final chemotherapy session (although I still have weeks on the horrible, toxic pills). On Monday the weather was gorgeous, so after going for the blood tests I have to do two days befor each chemo poison torture session, I went for a walk, got lunch, then walked more, and then more. All the way from Gorgie to Haymarket, to the West End of the New Town, then Saint Cuthbert’s and Princes Street Gardens (where I found to my delight the Nepali Scottish Mela was taking place), then round King’s Stables Road to the Grassmarket, West Port, then the Meadows and finally a well-earned seat in Cloisters for a rest, drink and read my book.
(Above: I was really pleaased with the way the focus turned out on this shot, the foreground sharp, the background in soft focus – this effect is called ‘bokeh’ – and the contrasting colours. There’s even a wee bee on a flower in the foreground. Below: another bokeh shot, the sharp flower in the foreground, the rearwards one in soft, blurred focus giving depth to the shot)
Of course the camera was also out for its stroll, and the light was so good (half the work done for taking a good pic is having the right light), and I took dozens of photos of everything, from street photography of people to architecture to flowers. Lots and lots of flowers, as it turned out.
(wee bee nestling inside a flower on the lower right)
I make no apology, the light made the colurs so vibrant, I kept taking more photos, stopping frequently when I saw more. In among this long, waking nightmare of my cancer year, the beautiful light and the colours of the flowers and the buzzing of bees landing on them (you can see some wee busy bees in several pics), all combined to make me feel alive and make me smile and just drink it in (and, me being me, to capture that light and colour in a photograph and share it).
(For the obvious reasons, I normally shoot in colour for flower pics, but some simply work better in monochrome, especially when they have that strong contrast being partly in the sunlight, partly in shadows. I don’t grayscale in Photoshop, if you see my pic in B&W it means I choose to shoot in B&W, I think the effect works better; also I don’t like monkeying with my photos in Photoshop like a lot of people do these days, I am old-fashioned, I think a photographer should do most of their work through the lens, picking mode, angle, composition as they shoot. That’s what photography is about, capturing what you see, not altering it all afterwards)
I absolutely tired myself out – my battery charge is very limited as the chemo screws your basic biochemstistry, the thing your body relies on, but it was worth it for a good day when I got to smile, to marvel at the beauty of the world and not think about bloody cancer for a few hours.
I’m not going to post all of them here – you can, as ever, check them all out on the Woolamaloo Fickr stream (now well north of 30, 000 pictures uploaded!), where you can also view the much larger versions, as well as my many other photos. Hope the flower images brightened up your day a little.
It’s that time of year when the cherry blossom trees are blooming with silken petals, all over the city. My favourite spot to enjoy them is in the Meadows, the huge, popular park in the middle of the city, which boasts two avenues lined with cherry trees, creating a “tree tunnel” you can walk through.
While I was stuck for those eight, long, dragging days in hospital, dreaming of being able to go outside again, I found myself thinking that the sakura would bloom within a few weeks, and I wanted to be out of hospital and also to be recovered enough to walk through it. I do this every year, but this year, with the cancer surgery and ongoing treatment (chemo now awaits… sigh) it felt more precious than ever. I was dreaming of walking under those branches, heavy with blossoms, with my friend on my arm.
So, each day since I got out and moved back to the family home, dad and I would go for small walks to help me build myself back up slowly, then after a week I moved back to Edinburgh to my own flat, continuing my walks each day. On one such walk I saw the blossoms were almost full, so arranged to come back a few days later with my friend, and we promenaded arm in arm under those delicate blossoms. The Meadows was full of happy people enjoying the burst of fine, spring weather and the arrival of the blossoms, just a lovely atmosphere, and, as I said, this time with everything I have been enduring, it just felt so much more precious to do this annual ritual.
And I shot a couple of “walk through” videos to go with the photos:
On one of our daily recuperation strolls with dad a few days ago, we had driven to Hogganfield Loch in Glasgow, a good-sized body of water which used to be home to rowboats (sadly they seem to have gone, at least for now), and large amounts of birds make it their home. As we walked around (slowly, my pace is so reduced I don’t have to remind myself to slow down to match my dad!), I snapped a few photos (of course), spotting this Goldeneye duck in the loch (as everyone knows, the Goldeneye is the most James Bond of all ducks!!).
According to a wildlife site, the Goldeneyes spend much of the winter in the Highlands and come down to central Scotland in the spring, attracted to large bodies of water like this, so we were lucky in our timing (I could only see this pair, perhaps there were a few others further out).
A fellow photographer we had been chatting to pointed us to a large body of reeds in a corner, just beyond the main path, where a heron was standing, stock-still. Then every now and then it would move, very slightly and slowly, and I realised it was stalking something in the muddy ground between the reeds.
I managed a few photos, then saw its head duck down swiftly – it had found its prey. I couldn’t get a clear photo because the head was below the reeds now, so it was obscured. I could just make out the heron scooping up some hapless creature (likely a frog) in that long, sharp beak, tilting its head back to swallow it. By the time it raised its head above the reeds again so I could take some close-ups, it had already consumed whatever it had been hunting.
Still, it was remarkable to get close enough to use the zoom to get a few close-ups of this creature – you can see the dinosaur heritage in these things, especially when hunting remorselessly.
After a day of mixed weather, going from sunlight to showers and back, it was quite nice on the walk home from work, so I detoured through the old boneyard near my flat, to take some pics of the chestnut tree.
The sun was declining, the lower parts of the tree were in evening shadow already, but the upper branches and leaves and chestnuts were catching that copper-coloured, last hour of sunlight, so I zoomed in to catch a few close-ups.
I got quite lucky with some close focus shots – bokeh, as it is often called, where the object in the foreground is sharp and the background a soft blur.
And what is autumn without more chestnuts?
A week of very mixed weather, bright, warm, summer sunlight and heavy showers and gusty winds, then back to sunshine. While unpredicatable, this weather does offer up one of the smallest but loveliest of simple pleasures: raindrops on flower petals. Sometimes something as simple and everyday, such as the stroll to work, yields such precious, little moments.
The older I get, the more important it feels to pause, even if only for a few seconds, to admire such things, when the world offers them up to us; they make our days more magical, and remind us, regardless of how full the news is of dreadful happenings, that we can still find little, magical moments, if we pause and look.
We lost our old breeding pair of swans on our stretch of the Union Canal a couple of years back, so after many years of taking photos of them, and then their cygnets each spring, for a few years this part was without the welcome, annual event of the birth of new swans each spring.
We’ve had a young pair of swans for a little while now on this part of the canal around Fountainbridge (close to where the Union Canal finally terminates near the city centre), and we’ve been waiting to see if they would actually form a breeding pair and mate successfully. Earlier in the spring some friends alerted me to them building a nest – first time breeding for this pair, and they didn’t pick the best location (it is in quite a busy area, a more isolated part would be better, like the previous pair did). However, we were excited, then when we saw eggs in the nest, and mama swan (Cindy) brooding on them in April, we became excited – would we be seeing new cygnets in the near future?
Well, yes, we did! A little over a week ago, my friend sent me a message to say the first egg had hatched – I had walked past there on the evening before and nothing had happened at that point, so the wee fella was born some time the next morning. He or she was born on the 99th birthday of the wonderful David Attenborough, so we decided to name it Attenborough! I was off that Thursday, so I walked up to the nest location to find several of my friends standing in the sunlight watching, and there was wee Attenborough, less than a day old, nestled up between mama and papa.
And then something even more remarkable – I noticed little Attenborough start moving along to the rear of his parents, something had his attention. It turned out to be the noise of an egg shell cracking – another sibling was being born right as we stood there, with wee Attenborough trying to help by pecking at the shell, then mama started too, and in a moment a little head, slicked by the gunk inside the egg, emerged, then its head flopped tiredly down.
All these years I have taken photos of each year’s cygnets, but I have never actually seen one being born! What a magical moment to witness. These photos are literally capturing the first couple of moments of this small creature’s life on this planet. I couldn’t help but think I was watching something that has been happening for hundreds of millions of years – ninety million years back and this could have been a baby T-Tex or raptor emerging from its egg (birds, after all, are descended from the theropod dinosaurs), and here I was able to witness it and capture it on film to share.
A week later and three eggs have now hatched, but sadly the remaining few have not, and given the last one to hatch was several days ago, and the mama has stopped sitting on them, it seems unlikely they are viable. However the three cygnets are now out with mum and dad (Cindy and Mr G), swimming around near the nest, and enjoying being fed (please, no bread! It’s not good for the birds or the canal – grains, sweetcorn, green leaves etc are best).
So delighted to have these little miracles near us, and looking forward to taking more photos of them as they grow over coming months. And I still can’t get over seeing one actually hatching and entering the world (and on Attenborough’s birthday of all days!).
The annual miracle of spring returns, and with a burst of beautiful, bright, golden, spring sunlight, my chum and I decided to enjoy a Sunday promenade below the lines of cherry trees, now in full blossom. While there are plenty of such blossoms around the city, in the Meadows there are two avenues of them, creating a “tree tunnel” that you can stroll under, and as you can see, it’s a popular thing for many of us to do as spring finally exerts its dominance over the departing winter.
This glorious little miracle happens every year, and every year I feel compelled to take some photos and share them again. After the dark, long, winter, it’s good for the soul to take in the light and the return of colours, those fabulous pinks against a clear, blue heaven above, just gorgeous.
Of course, I took a monochrome shot too, despite the colours it was also just begging for a B&W snap too.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one taking photos of it all!
As ever, click the pics to see the full size versions on my Flickr stream.
Walking home alongside the Union Canal as dusk was falling on an autumn day, when I saw this flock of birds wheeling and turning, all in tight formation, just behind some tenements, circling and turning, lower on each pass. I barely had enough time to get a couple of very hurried photos before they dipped below the line of the buildings and out of sight, but what a lovely thing to come across on a stroll home, a little bit of natural magic.
Fractal flower
I couldn’t resist snapping these flowers in the gardens around Christ Church, at Holy Corner. The repeating, concentric rings within rings of smaller and smaller petals was like a fractal in flower form.
I took a long walk along the Water of Leith at the weekend with a chum. It’s always a delightful stroll – the river runs through the city, quiet paths, trees, running water, birdsong – essentially it offers up a countryside walk right in the city.
This weekend’s stroll came with the added bonus of seeing a lordly heron, overseeing its kingdom, standing by the weir just below the back entrance to the Gallery of Modern Art. The few times I’ve been lucky enough to see a heron on the river before, they normally stand stock-still, just watching everything. This time, however, it started walking around, with that peculiar, long-legged gait, so I snapped more photos and some video (thankful again that my old but serviceable camera has a decent, big zoom lens to get a bit closer)
The autumn colours are coming out more and more – some recent, unseasonably warm weather may almost fool us into thinking it is more late August than early October, but the seasons continue regardless.
