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Our rebuilt rock garden 2 years later
Two years ago my husband and I devoted lots of time and effort to rebuilding our neglected rock garden, you can read about the whole process in this post. I was quite surprised to see how quickly the seedlings that I used from the original rock plants settled and spread. Only the Sempervivum varieties – especially the smaller ones – seem to need more time to cover the space which I assigned them to. On the other hand, some of the other plants have already tried to occupy neighbouring areas… Here are a few photos of and from the rock garden. It looks rather flat in the pictures, in reality it…
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Structured
Sometimes I find my surroundings way too showy, chatty, loud and unstructured, almost to the point of hurt. It’s a relief then to create images like this. Images withstraight linesclear directionminimalist contentcolours limited to shades of black and whitejust some grain and wispy patches to let the scenery breeze Sometimes I struggle to add text to my posts but fortunately a picture is worth a thousand words…
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Walk in Dobřív
There are many ways in which you get to know new places. I came to Dobřív along with my husband last year to capture some photos in the local hammer mill. We found out that next to the old mill there are also other interesting buildings in the village, houses keeping the air of old times. Here are a few photos from our walking around…
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Glassworks cutting room
As I mentioned in the previous post, last summer we visited old glassworks in Harrachov. It was interesting to see how the glasses are produced manually by men blowing into hot glass pieces and forming thus shapes of the glasses but the part of the glassworks that got my full attention was the room where the clear glasses are decorated manually by cutting their surface by a grinder, creating so various ornaments. I was absolutely taken aback by the quiet atmosphere of that room and I wished I had opportunity to spend at least an hour or two by absorbing the light, the colours and the objects and their mutual…
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Glassworks still life
The other day we visited glassworks in Harrachov where we participated in a guided tour. Imagine a large hall with old furnaces in the middle and several glassblowers showing how glasses are made manually and then tilt your head back and look at the humble “exhibition” of glasses, sitting high under the ceiling and creating a serene still life… Amid all that activity, this quiet spot felt like a touch of eternity.
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Like a bad dream
A few years ago I read an article whose author was thinking about how relatively peacefully we had been living in Europe since WWII and how that could not ever be a permanent condition. He warned that a war would come sooner or later because that is what history teaches us. His thoughts made sense but who would want to dwell on them… Not in vain our brains try to protect us by means of not thinking about all those things that could go wrong so that we would not live in constant fear. Now Russia attacked Ukraine and suddenly the war is real and not so far away from…
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Still life in an old hammer mill
While looking for photos for my project Technical last year, I came across quite a few interesting places I might not have visited otherwise, such as this nook in an old hammer mill in Dobřív. I love the contrast of the two ways of processing this still life photo, that dreamy imaginary on the left and the reminiscence of the old times on the right. What a different world many of us live in nowadays…
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About changes and beginnings
Sometimes, when I make a change or begin something new, I wish I could go back in time and apply the change to the past as well so that all the previous occurrences were tinted with it. Yeah, I know, it’s nonsense. How could that ever be a change or something new, if it was there all the time? But sometimes I find it really difficult to resist and make a bold line between what was and what is going to be…. even in the smallest unimportant things. For example, I’d like to go back through all of my posts here to improve their photos based on my current skills…
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Hydroelectric power station
Last year I started a photo project I call “Technical” and one of the places I visited when looking for interesting technical views was an old hydroelectric power station “Čeňkova Pila” in Šumava mountains. It is not used anymore but you can visit it and have a look at its Francis turbine to admire the technical work. As a visitor without special rights you usually have quite limited options when taking photos. I wish I could have had more time for extracting interesting details and I wish I could have used a tripod because there was little light and I had to shoot with ISO values climbing to the stars……
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Sometimes I need more colour
There is less light during winter here and not so many sunny days. Without snowy whiteness, such a winter’s day can be absolutely dreary. Why not bring some colourful atmosphere into it by focusing on available sources? That was my reasoning when I was choosing for processing the photo with those colourful chairs below, a photo that I took on one of our trips and that was waiting in my files for the right time to shine. But listen, when we are talking about colours, I have to tell you that my favourite one is green these days, the green in the Wordle game. It is the one below and…
