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Rock garden rebuilding
Wherever you dig in our garden, you most probably hit a stone. There are so many of them hidden beneath the surface that after each building work in the garden we get a new heap of stones of all sizes. What can you do with all of them? You can either use them or throw them away but you can’t simply dump them into a bin or somewhere, they are heavy and too many. No wonder then that one of our ideas for using the superfluous stones was to build a rock garden and place many of them there, so about 14 years ago my husband and I created our…
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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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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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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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Feel the calm
There are so many unnecessary words written and spoken, the universe hums and resonates with them. So you will surely forgive me when today I won’t add many in this post… … and will share just some colours and the atmosphere of calmness and tranquillity that I found in our garden. May they enrich your day.
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May in our garden
Do you document regularly or at least here and there your garden, house, flat, I mean the environment you live in? I’m sure I don’t do it often enough… even though I find it interesting to compare the older photos with the current appearance, one quickly forgets. On Sunday I decided to grab my camera and capture some details in our garden and I would like to share some of the photos with you. Paeonia suffruticosa is a flower that has never disappointed me… So elegant. The rhododendron below is a small bush which we bought for just a few bucks in end of season sale in Tesco supermarket and frankly, we didn’t expect…
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Beauty of the ordinary
On Friday we had what might be the coldest morning this winter with its -20°C, which equals -4°F. Actually, it would be the coldest morning in the 15 years we’ve been living in this village. I was a bit afraid that my car wouldn’t start because I was supposed to get to work and to get my children to school so it was a relief to hear the car making up its mind and waking into operation. The gear box was stiff and was moving with slow deliberation but we were on our way and that mattered. It was cold the whole week and we got plenty of snow but…
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Snowy
When I woke up on Sunday morning, the light felt different. I was wondering what was going on but as soon as I got up, I knew the answer. Everything behind the windows was covered with snow and its fresh white colour dominated surroundings of our house. Our garden, neighbours’ garden, our yard… I loved the occasional colourful contrast like in the following photo. Our neighbours across the road are building a new house and its unfinished condition looked wonderful against the snow. As soon as I saw it, I grabbed my camera, opened our kitchen window and took a few photos. I took some also from our dormer window…
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Autumn in crate
Another assignment from the Be still 52 course was to find a crate or a box and experiment with things put on top of it or inside it, play with the light and shadow, try and turn the crate this way or that way… Kim even started in-crate and on-crate series and I find it to be a great idea. There truly are so many possibilities, in fact quite simple but appealing possibilities, and I find it mind-blowing just to think about them. As you can see in the image above, I started with “in crate” composition and because my shooting was inspired by cleaning that I was doing in…
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Laundry time
I’ve already mentioned the task we got in the Be still 52 course, to try and capture quiet non-stylised real-life moments. We even got a few prompts to help us focus on a particular topic, one of them being “Laundry Time”. Well, there are many possibilities to capture that and I went for shooting our washed towels, dish towels and tablecloths hanging on the washing lines in our garden. Nothing was specifically arranged for the photo and I count this as a still life photo though as you can see, the pieces were moving in a breeze… The first photo is just basically adjusted, the other two images are further…
