Spring at last

Spring flowers

Spring has well and truly arrived.  Birds are feverishly gathering moss for their nests, bees are getting drunk on blossom nectar and daffodils are lighting the roadside verges with sunshine.  I have been getting out with my camera as much as I can rather than spending time indoors at my desk and I am very behind with blogging and replying to comments.  Please bear with me – spring fever will wear off eventually.  In the meantime, this is the first of a series of short posts celebrating the arrival of this most hopeful of seasons.

I know this poem has become cliché, but really it is so beautiful I can’t think of any reason not to enjoy it again, and again.

Daffodils
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

–  William Wordsworth

 

Weather front

Surrey landscape

50, f/11, 1.3″, 20 mm
Circ. polariser, .6 ND hard grad. and .9 pro glass (I think!)

Another shot from Tuesday’s day out along the Wey Navigation. Was it worth it, capturing this towering weather front, in return for three days of foul weather and counting? Definitely.

A return to bugs tomorrow – this warning is for you, Gunta. 😉

Seven Dials

London

ISO50, f/11, 16mm, 6×60 sec exposures


I was out photographing the floods again today but I thought I’d ring the changes here with a shot from last Friday. Traffic light trails around Seven Dials in Covent Garden, London.

PS For those who were curious after my post yesterday, I told her it would be better if she learned to take pictures with the camera she had, showed her the HDR button on her iPhone and invited her to join my camera club!

The little iron church

Esher, Surrey
The tiny, corrugated iron, ‘mission’ church of St. George is in the hamlet of West End, near Esher in Surrey. It was built in 1879 on land given by Queen Victoria so that the poor labourers of the village might be able to worship without the steep, muddy climb into Esher. Despite its temporary nature, the church, which overlooks the cricket green, is currently 134 not out!
Many thanks to my friend, Tony Antoniou, who kindly popped round yesterday to re-calibrate my monitor and at the same time showed me how to get better results from the HDR facility in Photoshop CC. This photo is my first effort using the tool properly. Tony is a talented photographer with a flair for environmental portraits and image manipulation. Do pop over and have a look at his website.

Desborough sunset

Surrey landscape
Sun sets over Desborough Cut, a man-made channel that allows water traffic to avoid the deep meander of the River Thames around Desborough Island, near Weybridge, Surrey.
If you missed yesterday’s post on achieving the starburst effect in camera, here’s a link: Starburst- no filter required.

Defying gravity

insect macro

On Tuesday, I waxed eloquent, well enthusiastic at least, about my new toy, the Fuji X-E1, but there is one thing it can’t do: decent macros of the very smallest critters in my garden. There my DSLR and macro lens rule supreme. This is an immature capsid bug showing off its gravity defying skills on a lavender leaf.