New playground

It's nice to play with other photographers, and to be challenged by assignments, but I gave up submitting links to any of the many memes that are around. I couldn't keep up replying to comments or visiting other people's sites, great and inspiring as they often were.
I've discovered ShutterSalt, though, which displays photos submitted to the weekly assignment by pulling them from the flickr RSS feed. You can then see all the submitted photos on the ShutterSalt frontpage. The site comes complete with a thoughtful blog and weekly interviews with photographers. Below is my take on last week's theme 'Opposition', featuring two of my neighbours, figuring out who has the ultimate say in what the doormat is for:

Still January

It was cold when we went out for our afternoon walk today. Hardly anybody was outside. I felt a bit melancholy, having worked on the computer all day with the BBC blaring Egypt updates into my ear. How much up-to-date is too much up-to-date?
The sunset, though, was gorgeous. It's very hard to resist a good sunset. Even though I've snapped so many of them.

Almost Christmas

It's time to leave the village for the Christmas holidays - if, indeed, we will manage to leave, snow and all. This will probably be the last time I'll get to post in 2010...which hasn't been a great year for blogging, but a very busy and productive year for pretty much everything else.
Have a happy holiday period, y'all, and a very happy 2011! I'm looking forward to reading your blogs, looking at your photos, and also to seeing some of you in the new year.

Snowed in again

I thought it would pass us by, but just as we're about to travel the snow has come for a visit.
When I woke up at 8am all was fine, so I turned around for another hour or so of sleep and when I woke up again there were a couple of inches of snow. We just about managed to drive the car out of the village (which has a steep hill on each approach) so as not to get completely stuck, like in January. We had a great cartoon-moment near the top of the hill, though, when the tyres weren't gripping at all any more, the car had almost come to a standstill whilst revving loudly, and we thought we'd be sliding backwards into the abyss any second. Magically we made it up to the crest nevertheless.
The birds were looking quite cheesed off all day and the food I put out for them kept disappearing under the snowflakes



but young Toby, our neighbour, has a smart winter coat (matching his owners) and was as keen as ever:

Light - which light??

A lot of people state that good photography is all about light. I don't think whoever came up with this first ever lived in England. And if you are a small-time photographer like me, and you have a day job, and a nighttime job to boot, you might not have a chance to get any decent light-situation during the dreary weeks of English winter.
My local microclimate is particularly mean. At sunrise - which at the moment is around 8am - the sky is usually clear, but by the time I have had my breakfast a major cloudbank is greying everything over. I don't always have the time to go out during that precious hour and at the weekends I do like to sleep in, so I often have the choice to either take photos in flat light or to take none.

Yesterday was a day of exceptionally uninspiring light. Before we headed out for some fresh air I decided to take my Eos 7D (whose autofocus in low light conditions is far superior to the 5D Mark II) and my 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens which is - well - good for macros but also generally sharp and clear in low light conditions. I got the most peculiar results. Making the photos smaller for the web has of course enhanced the grunge-factor, but even then the originals look more like paintings than photos (and that's not because I forgot my glasses at home):








This morning, though, I snuck out before breakfast:

Oxfordshire Melancholia

Oxon is really quite flat, except for the occasional river valley. Such as the one in which we live. We're of course not aware that we live on the edge of a valley - we like to believe we live on top of a hill. Going downhill, over the bridge and then up again takes us to where the flatness of Oxfordshire begins again. In the shape of a big field. In winter the field is quite melancholy:



And in summer perhaps too, albeit in a different way:

Give Way on Dartmoor

I went to Dartmoor this weekend, where I met a friend from Holland. Admiring the beauty of Devon over breakfast he concluded that there cannot be any industry whatsoever in this part of the country. This reminded me of a fieldtrip to Dartmoor I did a few years ago. The days were cold and blustery, and we were taken to landfill sites, disused arsenic mines and kaolinite pits. The trip did alter my image of Devon. Not all of it is green and hilly, and they do have some mystifying road signs:



I'm not sure what one is meant to give way to exactly here - but conceivably there are a few possibilities, maybe including the mythical kaolinite beast of Dartmoor.

If you would like to see more weird signs, visit This Way - Thurs-way, hosted by Jan.

Or if you prefer your Devon to be more conventionally beautiful have a look at these fabulous images of a gifted young photographer.

Otmoor

Sometimes grey and wet unexpectedly turns into sunny spell. As was the case some afternoons ago, when we went for a walk on Otmoor, a boggy place not far away from Oxford. It was very cold and just moments before the sun came out we had been trapped on a flooded field and had fought hard to keep our shoes dry (with limited success). This sight, however, made up for all the pain:

Radcliffe Square

Most of the time the weather here is either grey and dry, or grey and wet. The other day it was grey and wet. I stopped on my way home on Radcliffe Square - it was drizzling quite nastily but nobody (including me) had a brolly.



I was tempted to seek refuge in the Radcliff Camera, which is a Library -



it looked quite cosy, as you can see if you click on the pic, but then I remembered how dusty it is inside and so I scuttled off into the wet dusk.

Happy Love Thursday!

I have been following Love Thursday over at chookoloonks for a while.
Now I thought it would be nice to start this photo-blog with a bit of love: the snow drops have just come out in the south of England (after a rare bout of snow). They are the first signs of spring (and joy and growth and love!). I took a photo of those in my garden two days ago and noticed only then that the green spots on their leaves are in truth little green hearts. So I was pleased.
Just a few days before, the Glyme Valley, near my house, looked like this:



And I know - for somebody who lives somewhere less maritime or more northern this amount of snow is a trifle. But for England this was SCANDALOUSLY wintery, and we were snowed in and couldn't leave the village for days, in fact.