Another from the series of Native flowers I took a few weeks ago. This one a white grevillia. Taken with my FZ1000 and processed with Lightroom. This image is included in my 2020 calendar.
Photo of the week 41
Category: Uncategorized
Photo of the Week 40
Beach Fishing
I was going through my old photos looking for images for my Snapshots from Wollongong Series when I came across this one from Woonona Beach. It was taken in 2012 when I first began my photographic journey. It would have been taken with a Panasonic FZ100. Perhaps a tad overprocessed for my liking now, I think it is still a strong composition.
Photo of the Week 39
This week I have been messing with native flowers again in preparation for making a 2020 Wall calendar.
This is a white callistemon. Taken with my Panasonic FZ1000 and processed with Nik Software in Lightroom.
Photo of the Week 38
Shining brightly
This photo doesn’t do justice to the scene. A bleak factory bathed in blazing afternoon sun shining through the translucent sheets and casting a glow over the concrete.
Taken with my Panasonic FZ1000 and processed in Lightroom.
Photo of the Week 37
Long shadows of a past industry
This rather bleak image was taken in Port Kembla. It was late afternoon and the shadows caught my fancy.
Taken with my Panasonic FZ1000 and processed with a Lightroom preset.
Photo of the Week 36
Street photography
I really enjoy making street photos, but I am not very brave and tend to lurk and use a long lens to avoid detection. On this day, in June 2019, I was very brave and stopped and asked this fellow if I could take his photo. He agreed.
The dog on his shoulder is called Sasha. The two dogs not on his shoulder are Sasha’s cousins and belong to the man’s sister.
I regret I don’t know the man’s name. We chatted for a while he told me that Sasha had just started sitting on his sholuder when she was a little puppy.
Taken in Inverary, Scotland, using my Panasonic FZ1000 and processed with Lightroom and Nik’s Silver Efex Pro 2.
Photo of the Week 33
Primula Scotica
On my recent walking tour of the Orkney islands, our walking guide, Nigel had told us to be on the lookout for the elusive Primula scotica or Scottish Primrose. It was sharp-eyed Elaine who spied it first. Declared to be nationally scarce, it was indeed a lucky find! It is only small, about 13 mm across and maybe 7 – 8 cm tall. This one found on the walk from Skara Brae to Yesnaby.
Photo of the Week 29
Another view out the window shot. This one from Bettyhill, Scotland. I only stopped because I loved the name of the town.
Furious Fiction 5
What …with planning a big adventure to Scotland and all my creative energy directed towards travel and photography I haven’t written anything other than blog posts for a LONG time! Here is my effort for the August 2019 Australian Writers’ Centre Furious Fiction Competition.
500 words 55 hours $500 prize money!
I give myself the added restriction of if it doesn’t get finished on Friday night I don’t submit it. So essentially done and submitted in five hours!
The rules from their post are as follows:
Ten reams to go:
The shrill, piercing shreik punctuated the dark, quiet air like an ill-placed comma. It disturbed the reverie of the gnarly old writer for only a second, but this was enough to fracture her flow so completely that the shiny, silver lake of ideas that had been swirling in her mind was sucked into the vortex of her brain as is someone had pulled the plug. The story, the line of dialogue, was now a slithery trail of deceptive fiction never to be found again.
What had sounded like a dying baby was in fact only a peacock, settling in the trees after another steamy day in Paradise.
“Hah! Paradise!” she thought. How that description seemed so distant from the truth. The boundless enthusiasm of youth had been replaced by the scratched and weather-worn psyche of an older, creakier woman. The entertaining antics of the monkeys, now dull. The massive, crawling creatures that infested her shoes, no longer a source of wonder. She’d been here 25 years. 24 years, 11 months and 2 weeks longer than she had intended. For her, the holiday in Paradise had turned into something very different – a lifelong commitment.
She got up from the rickety table, pushing herself back with ink-stained hands. No computer for this one. She had to take it slow. She had to be more deliberate and carve each word into the paper indelibly with a slender blue pen. The cut and paste needed to happen in her mind before any words could land on that precious paper, fully formed and perfect. Editing was not a simple keystroke away but rather a laborious trudge of rewriting. Editing meant wasting paper, and paper was more valuable than anything she’d ever owned.
She placed the cold and greasy remains of her Sunday dinner on the floor and banged on the door.
“I’m done” she called.
While she waited, she farted and enjoyed the sweet and pungent aroma of herself wafting around her, enveloping her with the only marker of self-identity she had beyond her writing.
The heavy boots boomed down the corridor. The top hatch opened, and the eyes peered in.
“Move away from the door,” the warden barked.
The bottom hatch opened, the tin plate was whisked away and replaced by five sheets of paper. Five! It was Sunday, Paper Day!
She danced as she held the sheets tightly to her chest. Not too tightly! She didn’t want to crease them. She glanced at the other 6500-odd slivers of joy in the corner of her cell. They groaned under the weight of tightly-packed double-sided scrawl. The once bold script faded, in the same way her initial rants and protests had faded into a jaded acceptance.
The judge had said “Life” when he had banged that gavel. Life? This pile was her life! Would it be as tall as her when they shipped her out in a box? She did the maths. Ten reams to go. She’d run out of time.