Look up Look down on a seabird safari

I took over 100 photos on a lovely boat trip around two of the small islands in the firth of forth that are covered in seabirds.  Here are just 2 of them for a taster

looking up at masses of gannets enjoying the thermals and looking for a space to land

looking down at puffins bobbing around in between diving for sand eels

all the fun of carnival

the public fun in Edinburgh continues with a free carnival in the centre of town (roads closed, buses diverted) and plenty of music and dance bands.  I took the same photo approach that I did with the Jazz and focussed on capturing some details rather than trying to photograph whole groups when I could rarely see them through the crowds anyway.

I focussed on feet a lot because of the dancers and also I was noticing some nifty footwear. And of course there were gorgeous big headgear too.

I like the overall riot of colour and movement with nice details when you look at each piece close up.

Hope you all have some carnival in your life this week.

Colourful encore sunrise

6 weeks of Summer of Colour and then its over for another year, except this year Rinda suggested an encore and chose

and so I had fun playing with words to paint a picture for another week.

My first thought was sunset but then the phrase ‘its a new day’ came into my mind and I thought sunrise.

I was interested in the idea of sunrise as a time marker

I liked this but also wanted to try something with fewer words

again I liked it but wanted a more defined horizon

I liked this one too but decided to try a less flat look

and I liked this one as well but thought I could marry the textures background with the mass or words I used in the first one

I really enjoyed the process of creating several variants on my original idea over several days.  With digital creation it is all too easy to keep tinkering with one image but in this process I started again each time and did not save the layered details of each – when it was at a point that I was happy I flattened and saved so that I could not go back to tinker. 

Thanks to Rinda for prompting the encore and looking forward to seeing what others do with these colours.

Look up Look down at summer fruit

I do love strawberries and raspberries and given that they grow well here, they were the first things I planted in my garden 3 years ago.  Both are fruiting well which means pottering in the garden has taken on a whole new level of sweet pleasure.