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Funchal flowers and trees
The plant that I found most impressive in Madeira was a Plumeria tree with its abundant clusters of waxy looking pink and yellow flowers. The pink decorated the edges of the petals while the yellow spread from the middle of each flower, leaving the rest of the petals soft white. I guess we were lucky to be there at the right time to witness the vibrancy and freshness of the trees. I’m still enchanted by them and wish they could grow in our garden. Hydrangeas are undoubtedly my favourite bushes. Every year I buy one or two plants in a pot to decorate our terrace. I also tried to grow…
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Poisonous beauty
Once I bought small lupin plants to add them to my flower bed, they are such lovely flowers. But soon I found out that they are not only lovely-looking but also quickly-spreading and deep-rooting. If you don’t keep them at bay, they shamelessly displace other more modest plants. The other day I read an interesting and actually quite alarming article describing how mountain meadows in the national park Giant Mountains (Krkonoše) get overgrown with lupins preventing the smaller original plants from thriving and rendering the hay worthless because of their poisonous properties. Would you believe that only 100 grams of lupin seeds can poison a sheep? If I just imagine…
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Frustrating lilacs
Frankly, my photo project for this year hasn’t been progressing much, I haven’t been feeling inspired at all lately. Yet I admit, I know that good results are much more often achieved based on persistency and regular showing-up than on the famed inspiring sparks, and more often than not there is an opportunity to do something about it. My last photo post featured some lilacs from our garden and though they are long gone, more of their photos inhabit my computer. I chose two more this time and after endlessly struggling through their processing, here they are… You know that frustrating feeling when you see what result you want to…
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Lilacs
We had an exceptionally warm April this year and lilac bushes burst into flower almost three weeks earlier than usually. Felt sort of strange… But as lilacs are great flowers for any kind of photography, and still life is no exception, I used some of the flowers for playing with still life compositions. Here is one of them, in several editing results. It seemed to me I could get an interesting result when flipping the photo horizontally and adding it to some other version, so I created one more edit… …flipped two of them, and here is what came out of the experiment! What have I done? Now I cannot…
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Spring in the woods
Small and tendergrowing above ancient moss and withered autumnal leavesthriving in decomposing tree stumpsand filling the woods with spring beauty I never get tired of admiring them
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Ideas lost and forgotten
I commute to work daily and on my ways there and back, often the dots connect and I have ideas that capture my attention. Sometimes also words of a song I am listening to on the radio along the way trigger a train of thoughts I am glad to get on. I believe the brain works in a different mode at that time… And I often think “this would be interesting for my blog to ponder and write about…” But when I come home, the ideas are usually long forgotten, replaced by happenings at work and home routine and then in the evening I stare at the empty screen of…
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Flower phantasy
When I come home in the evening and I am tired, I tend to open a browser and keep clicking on article titles that catch my attention, read a bit of this and a bit of that, and eventually I find myself looking at articles I am actually not interested in at all. And after an hour or two I switch the browser off, being usually angry about wasting so much precious time I could have used for much more useful, needed or creative activities. Do you know that story from your life as well? Here and there it may perhaps be helpful to relax this way and don’t want…
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Playful water lilies
Yesterday I was asked what definition I would assign to a “photograph” and after some pondering, I came up with this: A photograph is a rendering of reality that may be documentary but also emotional, abstract or even somewhat imaginary, yet still preserving the core of that reality. Well, but what is that core, you may ask, it sounds sort of vague. And I would say that it is the hard-to-grasp distinction between a photo and an image… and we would be at the beginning again. You know, some people say that photography excludes digital art. But digital art has many faces, right, and some of it may preserve the aspect of…
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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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Rose inspiration
I have a small rose bush in my garden which burst into beautiful flowers this year. It made me feel inspired and willing to experiment with the photos where I captured it. You see, using textures in editing might have been fashionable a few years back, yet I believe that using a technique is not just a question of fashion, it is also a question of what you want to achieve and where you want to arrive. The texture I used and the photo I applied it to let me mold their expression to something that speaks to me. Although I am not generally a fan of bright colours and…
