It might almost be the end of summer, but our garden isn’t short of colourful blooms.
The rosemary hedges haven’t stopped flowering since the start of spring. It’s made the bees very happy.
The grevilleas are having their second wind.
Our beautiful ‘surprise’ orchid. It’s popped up from nowhere on the fence line.
They might be late-bloomers, but our patience has certainly been rewarded when it comes to our crepe myrtle tree.
Our second week of photography concentrated on colour – being able to see it, capture it, and even change it (by changing the white balance setting) to create different moods.
This porcelain snuff box on the dark wooden window sill looks like a scene from Downton Abbey. It is on auto white balance.
Give the scene a blue cast (tungsten setting) and it’s more like a scene from Agatha Christie.
I played around with the tungsten setting a lot. Here it created a contrast of colours (blue and yellow) that’s very cinematic.
Bridie Beagle might be the only beagle on the block, but there are plenty of naughty kitties around. Usually they roam about at night, but this one was particularly game.
Bridie was soon on its case. Lots of loud barking and very alert posture and tail.
Kitty ran off very quickly indeed. All was right again in the world.
My first attempt at a carrot cake went well, and tasted even better. Those old Family Circle cookbooks still do a good job.
While I was busy capturing light, I noticed that there were some really good clouds in the sky.
Sydney doesn’t do fluffy white clouds too often, so I really clicked away.
And there was more of the same the following day!
I was happy.
I’m not usually a morning person, but getting up early has its benefits when it comes to capturing light.
First rays hitting the front garden.
Light peeking through the shutters.
The softest of light hitting the brickwork.
Evening light produced a very different mood.
Under the Hills Hoist.
An evening star.
Night shadows and light.
With my newfound enthusiasm for light, I found a raft of things to photograph inside the home that afternoon.
How light reflected off the enamel wash stand.
How it diffused through the wispy curtains.
How it cast shadows on to the floorboards.
Simple everyday things were suddenly a little special.
This week I started another photography short course, an extension to the course I took this time last year.
To get us all thinking about photography, the first week concentrated on light and how to capture it. When you think about it, photography is just about capturing light as it reflects off various subjects. It’s how we capture that light that makes things interesting, and in an age where everyone seems so snap-happy, making ‘interesting’ images getting more difficult to do. Well, I guess we can only try.
As an exercise, we went a few doors down to the Paddington Reservoir to look around, and eventually snap a few photos. Last year I had a go at a few shots there myself, but this time around the light conditions were very different. It was midday and very bright. That made for some interesting shadows.
But what I liked the most was how the bright light reflected off surfaces, like water.
Well, that was a really long blog break! It’s three weeks into 2015 and I hope you have been enjoying these very warm days. We’ve been on the Central Coast post-Christmas, but frankly I haven’t taken out my camera a whole lot. The only photos I have for you are these from a brief visit to the village of Patonga.
The Hawkesbury was a good place to be if you were a fisherman as there was a really warm current for a week or so after New Year’s Day.
Although Umina Beach was packed, there weren’t too many people swimming here. Probably a good thing since we heard through the grapevine that someone caught a bull shark just off the wharf!
I’ll be starting a photography course next week, so there will hopefully be more photos to post in the near future.
Static and Silence 