Posted on July 26, 2020
This week’s instalment of the Smartphone Challenge is thankfully rather more straightforward than some we’ve seen recently. The theme is ‘Exit’.
So that’ll be a door then. Like this rather tatty specimen in Bellac.
52 Week Smartphone Challenge: 30 Exit
Category: Doors Tagged: 52 Week Smartphone Challenge, 52WeekSmartphoneChallenge, Bellac, Doors, Exit
Posted on July 19, 2020
Week 29 of the Smartphone Challenge is a bit of a strange one. ‘Use DOF to make a subject appear part of something larger’.
I know what they mean and I even know how it can be achieved with a normal camera – you use a very narrow aperture to give a deep depth of field so that both foreground and background are in focus.
The problem is that depth of field on a smartphone camera is fixed. The camera on my iPhone 11 has two settings: wide (ƒ1.8) and ultra wide (ƒ2.4). Narrow they ain’t.
No doubt someone out there can tell this bear of little brain how to do it, but for now I will have to settle for this trompe l’oeil photo of an old watering can, seen at a vide grénier in Blond.
Taken head on, the spout can’t be seen so the rose looks like it’s part of something larger that is the can itself.
52WeekSmartphoneChallenge: 29 Depth of Field
Posted on July 12, 2020
This week, the challenge is to post a picture that conveys ‘your culture’.
Which begs the question, what is my culture? As an English (although I prefer to be Scouse, which is most definitely not the same thing) expatriate living very happily in rural France, the answer is by no means clear-cut.
However, I think this image of a brightly painted old-fashioned cart on display outside the Mairie gives a decent idea of my current cultural circumstances.
52 Week Smartphone Challenge: 28 Your Culture
Category: Uncategorized Tagged: 52 Week Smartphone Challenge, 52WeekSmartphoneChallenge, cart, Culture, France, Mezieres-sur-Issoire, Rural
Posted on July 4, 2020
I am eternally grateful that these beautiful eyes look at me and aren’t repelled by what they see.
52WeekSmartphoneChallenge: 27 Gratitude
Category: Uncategorized Tagged: 52 Week Smartphone Challenge, 52WeekSmartphoneChallenge, Eyes, Gratitude, portrait
Posted on June 27, 2020
We reach the halfway point of the 52 Week Smartphone Challenge with, thankfully, a reasonably straightforward theme: geometry.
The roof of our neighbours’ barn is, if you look at it carefully, a riot of curves and straight lines – and certainly geometrical. It just goes to show that geometry is all around us.
52WeekSmartphoneChallenge 26 Geometry
Category: Uncategorized Tagged: 52 Week Smartphone Challenge, 52WeekSmartphoneChallenge, Geometry, Roofs
Posted on June 21, 2020
‘Free as a bird’. That’s what they say, isn’t it?
52 Week Smartphone Challenge: 25 Freedom
Category: Uncategorized Tagged: 52 Week Smartphone Challenge, 52WeekSmartphoneChallenge, Birds, Freedom, London, River Thames
Posted on June 14, 2020
The great irony this week is that the theme for the Smartphone Challenge is ‘who inspires you?’ and I have rarely felt so uninspired in my entire life.
However, to get round the inherent difficulties this week I have – and I freely admit it – cheated. Here’s how.
If you have ever looked at my other blog you’ll have quickly picked up that I am a huge fan of the Grateful Dead and I truly do find their endless inventiveness an inspiration. So, using my smartphone, I took this screenshot of a photograph of Jerry Garcia.
And that’s what you’re getting for this week.
52 Week Smartphone Challenge: 24 Who Inspires You?
Posted on June 7, 2020
Week 23 of the Smartphone Challeneg is, frankly, a bit of an odd one. We are invited to use strong leading lines in food photography.
Okay….
Now, as I do not use Instagram (where I believe it’s compulsory), I’m not in the habit of posting photographs of every scrap of food I consume, I just had to come up with something.
So here’s a picture of a swede (‘rutabaga‘ en français) on our kitchen table.
52WeekSmartphoneChallenge
Category: Composition Tagged: 52 Week Smartphone Challenge, 52WeekSmartphoneChallenge, Food, Kitchen, Leading Lines
Posted on June 1, 2020
I thought that this rather mysterious painted shopfront in the nearby town of Bellac was suitable for the theme of ‘Stranger’ in Week 22 of the 52 Week Smartphone Challenge.
In English, the words over the door read: ‘At the beginning of the 90s…somewhere in the desert of Tamalkan…I lost myself’
I can find no trace of anywhere on Earth called Tamalkan. The mystery deepens…
52WeekSmartphoneChallenge 22 Stranger
Category: Doors Tagged: 52 Week Smartphone Challenge, 52WeekSmartphoneChallenge, Bellac, Doors, Shopfront, Stranger, street art
Posted on May 23, 2020
“What does serenity mean to you?’ is the question posed for the 21st instalment of the 52 Week Smartphone Challenge.
I always find this view very tranquil and calming (not that I often need to calm down). It’s what I see when I look over the wall of our back garden. The two fields were bought with the house, so for a few brief minutes I am master of all I survey.
52WeekSmartphoneChallenge: 21 Serenity
Category: Landscape Tagged: 52 Week Smartphone Challenge, 52WeekSmartphoneChallenge, France, Landscape, Rural, Serenity