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Hluboká chateau
What can you do when you start your holiday and the rain is pouring mercilessly ? Well, you can for example visit a castle or chateau and participate in a guided tour such as we did, not letting the rain spoil the experience. The chateau in the photos below is called “Hluboká”, it is one of the most famous and most visited chateaus in the Czech Republic. Its past is closely connected to the Schwarzenberg family that played quite a big role in the history of the Czech Republic. They owned the chateau for several centuries and made it their representative seat. In 1947, the chateau was confiscated by means…
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Thoughts on maintaining order
When we got stuck at home during the corona crisis, I decided it would be a good time to remake our rock garden. We created it long time ago and throughout the years its weaknesses became evident and it got somewhat neglected. With my husband helping me doing the most challenging work, the reconstruction was finished in about four months and three weeks ago I planted fresh cuttings from some of the old plants. The cuttings settled well, faster than I expected, and even started to grow. But with them, new weed appeared, spread quite quickly and needed to be removed to keep the earth clear. So I’ve done the…
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Curly leaf parsley
I thought the fresh curly leaf parsley that I grow in my garden would be good not only for cooking but it could also look good in still life photography. So here it is, in two versions of a still life image. Two images, two different stories despite almost the same contents. The power of editing is awesome… By the way, as for the cooking, I add curly leaf parsley to soups, potatoes and stuffing, it adds “a breath of nature” and tastes good!
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Appeal of gardening
Is gardening an acquired taste or do you need to have particular genes to enjoy working in the garden? I loved my grandma’s garden since childhood but for our children (who actually are not kids any more), our garden represents just hard and repetitive work. Yes mom, the flowers are nice, the gooseberries are good, but don’t pressure us to waste our precious time by performing those tiresome and boring gardening activities… How could I make them understand? Perhaps YOU understand? OK, I won’t torture you by asking such questions, I’ll rather share some of the beauty I find worthy of the gardening effort. First, would you recognise the plants…
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Church of Nativity of Virgin Mary in Strašín
There are places where you simply feel good and for me one of those places were premises of the Church of Nativity of Virgin Mary in Strašín. Strašín is a small town in Šumava mountains and the church, whose origins go back to 13th century, is situated on its edge. It is, or perhaps rather used to be, a pilgrimage church where Mother Mary was worshipped. There are several legends relating to the place including the one about revelation of Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus and appearance of a healing spring with an energy point. I don’t know if you believe in such things, I certainly have my reservations…
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Peony magic
The tree Peony (Paeonia suffruticosa) that we have in our garden does not look great this year. The weather has been enormously dry this spring and the leaves of the bush are partly dry as well. Also the buds and flowers have been fading quickly. My son noticed yesterday that one of the lower growing branches was broken so I cut it off entirely and put into a little vase at home. It looked tempting to be captured and eventually I used it and another even more faded flower for my still life photography. Funnily enough, I ended up with quite a different photo than I started with… Isn’t the…
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Cold and rainy
Last night it was raining heavily here, the rain woke us several times when beating against our roof lights. And not only brought the night the rain but also a change in temperature when it dropped a few degrees lower in comparison with previous warm days resulting so in a wet and cold Sunday. Well, despite the noise, we were happy about the rain as the weather has been very dry lately and the level of ground water is very low here. Abundance of water is one of my dreams now, who would have thought! No more taken for granted. And as everything outside was soggy, I decided to discontinue…
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Focus propriety
The other day I was taking photos of some of my succulents, playing with both composition and focus. In the triptych below I put together three versions of one of the photos. When I showed the photos to my husband, he told me that in his opinion, the focus must definitely be on the succulent as it is the main subject in the photo. He evaluated the first version with the sharp ribbon and blurred succulent as utterly bad. I thought about it a lot but although I respect the opinion, I don’t quite see eye to eye with him on the matter. We put the focus where we want…
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Build up when creating your art
I make the same mistake all over on my photography path. I always want and almost expect to get my camera out, take a photo and be a witness to how great an image I created. Stupid, right? It happens here and there that the first photo is good, sometimes better than the following ones but much more often I need to start somewhere, immerse myself in the photography mood and build up. The same applies to editing. I edit a photo or two and don’t like any of that, but the process may give me an idea for editing an absolutely different photo. Like in case of this lawn…
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Abstract vision
My son attended an exhibition with his class today and that led to our subsequent discussion about the styles of paintings we like and dislike. We’ve found out that we especially do not see eye to eye with one another on abstract art, which I like and my son does not. That made me rummage through my photo archive to find if I have any abstract photos at all. And I have, look at one of them… As much as I love sharpness and contrast, abstract vision opens to me a door to different perception. What do you feel when looking at an abstract? I always feel curiosity and need…
