Weekly Photo Challenge: Tiny

It’s something of a family tradition that Madame – whose talents are limitless and certainly extend to cake-decorating – makes birthday cakes for our twin grandsons.  For their third birthday, they wanted trains and so she came up with these, intricately decorated with sliced up Liquorice Allsorts (those that managed to escape my evil clutches), Smarties and fruit gums. Naughty but nice.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Tiny

All you need to know

Nothing much to add in explanation of this image of our local village’s electronic information sign. Except perhaps that those clouds really were as dark and threatening as they look: about five minutes later we had a brief but heavy hailstorm.

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Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Signs

Macro Moments: Week 18 – Oil-lamp

This is a detail from the body of an antique oil-lamp, part of a collection on display at a local exhibition of crafts and hobbies that we attended last Sunday.

I cranked up the ISO so as not to have to resort to flash, which wouldn’t have done any favours to the warm glow of the metal.

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Nikon D800 with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 lens at 70mm. 1/90 at f8, ISO2500. Cropped and edited in Lightroom.

Macro Moments: Week 18

Thursday Doors: St Andrews (part 2)

As promised, this week we have some more of the interesting doors on offer in St Andrews – although, just to be awkward, we begin with a gateway: to one of the old buildings of the University (the Latin expression over the gate reads ‘In principio erat verbum’: ‘in the beginning was the word’).

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This is a wider view of one of the most prominent commercial buildings in St Andrews, the J & G Innes bookshop, with its original windows and wooden frontage:

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Rather more dourly Scottish is this example:

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Down by the harbour is the rather more modern Harbourmaster’s Cottage:

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Some more traditional doors, gentrified by the people who live behind them:

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Thursday Doors 10 November 2016

Tuesdays of Texture: Autumn Leaves

For my latest contribution to Narami’s Tuesday of Texture challenge at De Monte Y Mar, this is a photograph I took only last Sunday afternoon on a stroll around our local village. Plenty of textures here, as autumn leaves pile up on the tarmac against this old metal gate:

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52 Weeks Photo Challenge: Week 14 – Winter

As it happens we woke up this morning to our first significant frost of the year – a sure sign that winter is on its way. It had all thawed before I could get my camera out, but here’s a winter scene that I photographed a couple of years ago during a walk ‘around the block’ (about three miles). The low sun on the barren tree in the foreground made the whole image stand out for me.

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52 Weeks Photo Challenge: Week 14 – Winter

Weekly Photo Challenge: Chaos

When we bought our house in France, it had been unoccupied for some time.

Unoccupied but not unused. Our neighbours – sheep farmers at the time – had taken to use it, probably initially as a storeroom, subsequently as a general repository for what can only be described as ‘all sorts of crap’. So our first view of what became our TV room was this, which I think could fairly be described as chaos (as well as a few other choice epithets).

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Chaos

It looks better now:

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Chaos

At least the flowers are bio-degradable

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge for this week is ‘Things Made Out Of Plastic’.

This rather poignant image of some dead flowers dumped into a plastic bin-bag was taken during a walk to the next hamlet.

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Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Things Made Out Of Plastic

Thursday Doors: St Andrews

In a previous existence, we lived in Scotland for twenty years and it’s always good to return, as we did recently for a week’s holiday.

One of our favourite places is St Andrews – home of golf and also Scotland’s oldest University (established between 1410 and 1413) . We know it pretty well – not least because our daughter went to school there – but never tire of it. This is one of the gates to her alma mater, St Leonard’s:

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The town centre is very compact and there are plenty of solid old stone buildings to admire – together with their characterful doors:

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Some of the architecture is not only old but comparatively unusual, like this stone porch:

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Not so unusual, but still attractive is this old half-spiral staircase:

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The overall impression is one of solidity:

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More from St Andrews next week.

Thursday Doors 3 November 2016

Macro Moments Week 17: Berries

Early morning raindrops add interest to this bunch of bright red berries.

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D800 with 24-70mm f2.8 lens at 70mm. 1/90 at f4, ISO 140. Cropped and edited in Lightroom.

Macro Moments Week 17