week 12: Magnolia tree in spring

Springtime here in London has come and though we still have grey rainy days (do we ever not?) we also have some beautiful spring blossoms and sunshine. This lovely tree raining white blossoms everywhere is of the genus Magnolia. There is a huge amount of information about this species on wikipedia, most of which consist of more botanical naming and people involved in discovering various other such plants. I decided to forgo the pleasure of trying to reproduce any of that here :-)

As for the photo itself, it was taken just about at the "worst" time of day, right in the middle of the day with full sunlight. But I think it is justified in this case because all the building surrounding this little park cast shade on the tree most of the day and this photo just wouldn't have that spring feel to it if it was all shaded or alternatively if it was overcast.

That brings me back up to date, well mostly anyway though I will be posting my next one this weekend which is only another couple of days away.

week 11: Two umbrella's

Not having internet for 2-3 weeks put a serious stop to my blog, but I've got the photos to put up. So I won't be writing much on this one, more on the next post again.

week 10: St Ethelburga's wall

You may be forgiven for thinking I snuck off  to some Moroccan destination, looking at this photo. The truth however is even more interesting. This lovely location is right here in the heart of London, though I will admit the sky doesn't actually look like that; I replaced the drab building in the background with this sky, but it is a London sky taken last year in October, so its not cheating too much :-)

St Ethelburga's centre for reconciliation and peace is a London based charity situated in a small (rebuilt) church and its backyard. Though the charity is independent of the Church of England, the church bit of their property is still consecrated ground and christian services are held there. The backyard is less traditional (and also where this photo was taken). It consists of a lovely little space with raised beds and a water feature (on the other side of this wall) and to the left of the photo would be the yurt in which they hold several different kinds of events ranging from reconciliation talks to meditation sessions. Though they are Christian-led, they provide hospitality for people to resolve conflicts from across the world, including interfaith conflicts and hold that they want authentic dialogue between peoples of different faiths without either side trying to "convert" the other. Quite an different point of view from what one usually hears.

The photo as I said was processed to have the lovely blue sky in the background, which immediately lightens up the photo enormously (this was taken in the shade on a slightly overcast day) I wish I could have gotten the whole window into the composition too, but I was as far back as I could go, and changing the angle would have cut off the door, but I want to go back there and take this shot again with a wide angle lens when I have a camera that can do that.

Week 9: Pansies

Firstly I realised I mistakenly named my last weeks post week 9 - getting a bit ahead of myself there!

I have a pot of pansies in my front garden - the card called them halloween pansies, presumably because of the orange and purple bi-colour ones. But somehow I got a couple of lovely solid dark violet ones in there too. Pansies were developed from the viola species which are biennials, but have been selectively bred  to flower as soon as 9 weeks after the seeds are planted. They are winter hardy plants and survive frost and cold even during their flowering season which is why they are often used for colour in gardens during winter.

This photo is taken up close with the intention of using a shallow depth of field to separate out the single violet flower from the bi-colours in the back. It was taken by natural light on an overcast day (we have lots of them here in England :-) I tried using a reflector to give a bit of back lighting, but it didn't seem to work well and eventually I found that by turning the pot such that the direction of the light was from behind I was able to capture the "veins" and still have satisfactory lighting on the rest of the subject.