Monochrome Madness: Into The woods
Posted on May 28, 2025
This photo was taken at the Beecraigs Country Park, near Linlithgow in central Scotland, which is replete with woodlands.
I must have been originally attracted by the strong leading line of what just about passes for a path that leads to a clearing. However, to make it more interesting for the purposes of this theme, I applied an infrared filter and pushed the three ‘Presence’ sliders in Lightroom to the left by varying degrees, which gives the image a much more mystical – eerie, indeed – feel.
The stash
Posted on May 26, 2025
A bit late with this one, but I noticed that Dan’s CFFC challenge last week called for images of things made with fabric.
Now, Madame is a very keen quilter and as any quilter will tell you, you can never have enough fabric in what’s known as your ‘stash’.
So here’s a photo of one of many cupboards (thank you IKEA) that hold her stash. What you see here is, at a rough guess, about 25% of the total. A friend once remarked that this wasn’t so much a stash as a ‘facility’.
Cellpic Sunday – Arc-en-ciel
Posted on May 25, 2025
When half of the sky is bright sunshine and the other half has black clouds tipping it down, this is what you get (arc-en-ciel is the French word for a rainbow).
Lens-Artists Challenge: The First Thing I Thought Of..
Posted on May 19, 2025
Our challenge this week is to inject a little humour into proceedings by adding a caption to the selected image under the broad theme of ‘the first thing I thought of’.
This was indeed the first thing I thought of and – even better – it comes complete with its own ready-made caption. This little figurine has sat on my desk, whether at work or, as now, at home for more than thirty years.
Not that I ever feel put upon, you understand…
Cellpic Sunday: The Acceptable Face Of Weeds
Posted on May 18, 2025
Every spring, as growth restarts in the garden, we wait to see what will be what we call the ‘Weed of the year’ – the most prolific of the pestilential flora that deserves no place in a civilised garden, but takes over, vastly outnumbering any of its competitors.
Usually it comes down to an unpalatable choice between dandelions or – more likely – nettles. For 2025 however, the winner is – buttercups. They are everywhere this month. They’re so much nicer than any of the usual suspects that it was almost a shame to take the strimmer to them.
Monochrome Madness: Street Lighting
Posted on May 18, 2025
I confess that I had to do quite a bit of digging to come up with an interesting image of some street lighting. Typically, these are rather mundane artefacts that you wouldn’t often be bothered to get your camera out for.*
[Note to self: a conjunction is the wrong type of word to end a sentence with.]
However, I came across this image, which I had entirely forgotten about. High up on a wall in an old narrow street in the nearby town of Saint-Junien is this rather ornate but ancient lantern. Obviously designed for illumination, it certainly predates electric lights, and maybe even gas ones too.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Serenity
Posted on May 13, 2025
Is there a greater epitome of the idea of ‘serenity’ than a graceful swan gliding smoothly across the water – even if everybody knows that below the surface its legs are going like the clappers?
This particular specimen was swanning around in the lake at Linlithgow, in central Scotland.
Cellpic Sunday: Pretty in pink
Posted on May 11, 2025
We were in the town of Beverley in Yorkshire last week and I came across this rather lovely flower in somebody’s front garden.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Break the rules
Posted on May 6, 2025
I have posted a similar image before, but this is a more recent photograph.
On a very still but cloudy day, the reflections of the trees in the little pond we have here in the hamlet were almost perfect. So perfect, in fact, that you may not realise at first glance that I’ve flipped the original image vertically, so you’re actually seeing the reflections at the top of the screen. I thing it adds a dimension of dreaminess to the image.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Cinematic
Posted on April 28, 2025
This week we’re looking for cinematic images.
I took this photo in the desert outside the city of Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates. For me, the main attractions were the strong leading line and the combination of sand, scrub and stone. Oh, and the symmetry of the two slopes.
It’s not too much of a stretch to see this as an establishing shot in a Western, with the added mystery of what could be lying in wait on the other side of that crest……
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