Monochrome madness: Flowers out in the garden
Posted on October 8, 2024
In ‘real life’, as it were, these tiny flowers have bright pink petals. However, converting the image to monochrome goes some way to transform a ho-hum record shot into something a little more striking in its own right, partly helped by eliminating background distractions.

Lens-Artists Challenge: Setting a mood
Posted on October 8, 2024
The light of Golden hour adds a mood of serenity to this image of boats at anchor in the Vieux Port of the city of La Rochelle in western France.

Lens-Artists Challenge: Unexpected Vista
Posted on October 1, 2024
This week’s Lens-Artists Challenge is about finding beauty in unexpected places. Good one.
As the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder – in other words, a matter of personal taste, whatever the ‘rules’ say about the rule of thirds, the golden ratio or colour wheels..
This is actually the last photo I took in the month of September, so the ‘untouched’ version has been posted for Bushboy’s Last On The Card challenge here. It was taken in the nearby village of Rancon. It’s – obviously – an archway, although interestingly it’s completely free-standing and in fact the ground slopes away steeply about twenty feet beyond it.
What i failed to notice until I looked at it on the big screen of my desktop was the nicely framed vista that lay beyond, illuminated by the light of the ‘golden hour’. I wasn’t expecting that.

Free-standing
Posted on October 1, 2024
The last photo I took in September, with my trusty iPhone 14 Pro, was this image of a stone archway in the village of Rancon.
The rules of Bushboy’s Last Photo Challenge are that you present that last photo ‘warts and all’, as it were. In other words without any editing.
So that’s what I’ve done here. However, on closer inspection I was so struck by the image that I’ve also smartened it up for the latest Lens-Artists Challenge. You can find that version here.

Cellpic Sunday: The Curious Cat
Posted on September 29, 2024
Our recent walk around the nearby village of Rancon seems to have aroused the interest of one of the local inhabitants.

Stacked
Posted on September 24, 2024
There’s a long-running saga about a pallet-full of old roof tiles that our builders have ‘parked’ with us temporarily for about the past ten years. To be fair, they have used some of them to repair a couple of minor leaks that sprang up during this period, but there are still plenty hanging around.

Cellpic Sunday: Mushroom Season
Posted on September 22, 2024
It’s that time of year…
Rain followed by sun = mushrooms. No idea what variety they are, but I’m certainly not going to eat one…

A vertigo-inducing floor
Posted on September 18, 2024
This is a detail of a very extensive marble floor, to be found in Compton Verney House, in Warwickshire, in the English midlands.
(For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Diagonal Lines)

Cellpic Sunday: Sunset in La France Profonde
Posted on September 15, 2024
A particularly dramatic dusk one evening last week, here in the depths of the French countryside.

Rural layers
Posted on September 11, 2024
This image, captured in a rural area of north Yorkshire, not only pays due deference to the ‘rule of thirds’, but also meets the brief of Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week:





