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.

enjoying some jazz

The festival season in Edinburgh started this weekend with the jazz festival and free music on Saturday.  Knowing there would be crowds and that at my height I would not get great shots of the bands I decided to concentrate on capturing some details of the event. 
Even then it was not easy as taking photos through gaps in the crowd meant I often had shots like these


as people moved into my shot.

But I did manage to capture some musical instruments and details within the crowd of dancing and other photographers and drinks and applause. 

I’m pleased with the result and plan to repeat this for other aspects of the festival season.

Summer of colour mellows

Sadly the final week of Summer of Colour for 2013 and appropriately some more autumnal colours for the end of a summer theme

the words I used this week are from a TV advert for cider which features a poem specially written for it by urban poet Murray Lachlan Young  which I think is delivered very effectively by actor Francis Magee you can watch it on YouTube here  I love the rhythm of his performance so looked up the words and love them too.  Here I used just part of the poem

I used the sepia in a patchwork of pieces that I think look like old cloth – I like the contrast of a poem about now and the oldness that sepia implies.

Thanks to Kristin for organising this celebration of colour and providing a space for artists across mediums to share their work.  And thank you to everyone who has shared and who has visited me here

Look Up Look Down at the wild side

A visit to the Highland Wildlife Park provided plenty of opportunities for up and down shots (and yes an item for the Rinda’s scavenger hunt which I’ll share next week).

The Scottish wildcat looks like a domestic moggy (and many interbreed) but is bigger and wild.  This one was prowling along the caged pathways that link their enclosures.

The polar bears were enjoying their big pond in the summer heat – lovely to see them in a large enclosure.

Keeping my eyes wide open pays off

When Rinda revealed her scavenger hunt list for this year there were several that I was confident I would see but did not know exactly where they would be.  Two of these that I have found were candles and something napping

 

These are much cuter than the young seagulls which are just leaving their nests – with the added danger to pedestrians of low flying seagulls warning off people who walk too close to their young. 

inspired to record my digi timeline

I’m taking Ali Edward’s ‘Hello Story’ class which offers a story structure each week.  First up was using a timeline as the basis and I was inspired to create a layout about my digital use history – I’ve had several conversations touching on this recently.  I had great fun finding all the icons and looking up some of the dates. 

Being at a University meant that I had access to many new aspects early because they were often used on campus before they were generaly available. 

Have you recorded your history with all things digital?  or social media?

Candy apples and Johnny Cash for Summer of colour week 5

You know how sometimes when you are listening to a song that you have heard many times and a line suddenly sticks in your mind that you haven’t really noticed before ? surely it happens to other people too?

Anyway a line from ‘Walk the Line’ by Johnny Cash has been running through my mind so I used it as the basis for my Summer of Colour piece this week where the colour pair is

I wanted to play with layered repetition of a basic shape and chose some arrows to pile up to create a pleasing abstract piece. 

But I couldn’t find a good way to add words so I tried another version

which did work with the Johnny Cash words

and then I kept experimenting

and then used a different set of arrows to experiment with how much of the letters can be blurred but still be read

I’m really pleased with all three looks and still love these words, especially for us creative types.  Wishing you all an eyes wide open week.

Looking to see how others use these colours – each week I’m blown away at the wonderful gallery of pieces created from pixels and paper and fabric and paint and …

Look Up Look Down at seasonal change

I mentioned last week that I’d been thinking of looking back at some up down pairs from earlier in the year to see if there were any that I could replicate to show a change of season. 

My first pair showed the bare tree branches and early signs of bulbs in my garden


which were easy to replicate showing the lovely abundance in my garden and the local parks but interestingly not much change in the blue of the sky


I found a few more that I can replicate over the coming months. 

Scavenger hunt–paired capture

I had a good choice of towers to capture for Rinda’s scavenger hunt from the historic to the industrial.  My decision was sealed when I came upon a mosaic that related to one of the local towers meaning I could have 2 items with a link.

These towers are chimneys on old pottery kilns which used to be numerous due to the good clay deposit.  Non of the potteries are still operating and the towers are disappearing too.

I was delighted to find a pavement mosaic marking the importance of these towers in local history

a reminder to keep looking down in between studying clouds !

Counting the Joys of June

I must admit to enjoying Julie’s version of the end of month accounting more than I do my other (financial) month end number record – not because I’m having financial woes but because there aren’t any pictures or nice fonts or colour (although I should be glad there is no red there!)
So here is my summary for June

and in case you have never seen a group of over a hundred swans – this is what it looks like

all of the non breeding swans gather together in food rich areas at this time of year as they shed their old feathers and cannot fly.  The mouth go my local river is one of those gathering places.  During the rest of the year we have about 20 swans on the river.

And here are my crochet trials – the 2 squares are from a book of afghan squares on a site with free crochet e-books that Alexa kindly told me about.

Look up Look down at sunlight

Delighted to have seen a fair bit of sun this week and extra delighted with some photos that captured it both up through the leaves and down on the river

End of June means we’ve been doing this weekly photo capture for 6 months – and I’m still finding plenty of things to photograph, I’m planning on looking back at some winter ones to see if there are any I could duplicate for summer to show the seasonal difference.

Summer of Colour and a grey rainbow

A change from the bright pairs chosen so far on Summer of Colour with this week’s winning pair

and I’d been reminded of the brain exercise where you have to read the word green or yellow but it is very hard to read the word rather than say the colour that has been used.

and I wanted to use a wordle on a piece so I had a good play and came us with 3 variants, using the rainbow song.

and also added lyrics for ‘over the rainbow’

and one of my own wordart but using the wordle norm that a word is bigger the more often it occurs

looking forward to seeing the wonderful range of work that others create with this pairing.  And trying to remove a visual version of an earworm from my brain – as soon as I saw grey and pink I thought of the gallah parrots in Australia and now I can’t shake the image.

do you see what I see?

cloud watching is my latest past time thanks to Rinda and a cloud item on her summer scavenger hunt this year.

A lot of the time our sky looks like this

which I could claim looks like a drift of snow but I don’t think that will work.

The rest of the time I look hard and sometimes snap an image and then when I’m at my computer stare at the image trying to work out if that was snapped for the cloud or something else and what was it that I thought I saw.

So to check that I’m not operating on hope alone, here are my recent snaps

1.

2.

3.

4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

5.

I think there is a pair of fighting dinosaurs, a mouse, a woman riding a horse, a crab and an elephant – does anyone else see them?

Check out Rinda’s linky for news on how others are doing after the first month of hunting.