Weekly Photo Challenge: Green

A gallery of green, where the challenge for me is to not just post a tonne of leafy forests and grassy meadows.

Hammersmith Bridge

Larry the Green Tree Frog

Northern Lights

Dragonfly

Green Christmas

Peacock Feathers

Niagara Falls at night

Green Poinsettia

Lake Botnstjorn in Asbyrgi Canyon

Cueva de los Verdes

Lanzarote parrot

El Golfo

My green things:

• Hammersmith Bridge, London. I lived near this bridge for over four years, worked near it for over seven years.
• Larry the Green tree frog (yes, I snuck him in again, but only because he’s so cute)
• Northern lights over Iceland
• Lil dragonfly spotted in Richmond Park, London
• Christmas decoration from a Christmas shop in St Goar, Germany
• Peacock feathers from a handsome fellow in London Zoo
• Niagara Falls at night
• My very first ever photo taken with my first (and so far, only) DSLR, of a poinsettia I couldn’t get to turn red again
• Lake Botnstjorn in Asbyrgi Canyon, Iceland
• Cueva De Los Verdes – the Green Caves, Lanzarote.  The still water is a perfect reflection of the cave ceiling and walls
• A friendly parrot in Lanzarote
• El Golfo, a volcanic lake on the west coast of Lanzarote

Weekly Photography Challenge: Foreign

I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot, and so I have heaps of photos from many part so the world. But I struggle with the word “foreign”. I’m acutely aware that what seems foreign to me is totally everyday and banal to someone else. So who am I to decide that something is foreign?

But of course there is lots in the world that is weird and wonderful to me. As an Australian, snow is a particularly foreign substance. I’ve lived in the UK and I’ve travelled to snowy places, but even now the sight of a fresh blanket of snow in the early morning light is enough to turn me into a giggling 5 year old. SNOW!!! It doesn’t get much better. I’ve posted a few snowy images for other challenges before, so I’m hopefully not repeating myself too much, but here’s some of my favourite snowy shots.

Spring Melt in the French Alps

Lac du Montriond in March 2011, slowly melting in the warm spring sunshine.

Snow blown off Vatnajokull Glacier

Clear blue sky to the right, snow churning up into cloud on the right.  I really wish I’d thought to take a proper panoramic shot of this, it was really striking.

First Snow over the Rockies

I was on a road trip from Denver to Las Vegas about this time last year, and we saw this view from the road and absolutely had to stop to soak it in.

An Icelandic Winter Sunset

Snow is no foreign concept to Icelanders, but I just can’t get over its beauty and the simplicity it brings to a scene.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Silhouette

I LOVE shooting silhouettes.  Strip the detail away and you can reveal so much in the stark lines.

Artic Tern

The grace of a bird in flight.

The London Eye

A new look on a familiar landmark.

Swinging Gibbon

Fun and frolics or hanging on for dear life?  The crazy antics of an Siamang gibbon at Nashville Zoo.

West Pier, Brighton

In silhouette, nothing is there to distract you from the loss.  West pier in Brighton, built: 1866. Closed: 1975. Set on fire: Quite a lot.

Ray of Light

And silhouette can frame a detail that would otherwise be hidden and forgotten.

It seems I also quite like my silhouettes against blue!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy

So WordPress are showing off a new feature, and with the theme being “Happy” the challenge for me was limiting the new photo gallery to only nine photos. Missing from the gallery are all the people who make me happy, but here’s several things from around the world that will always bring a smile to my face:  Bright coloured flowers and the sunny days they grow in; spotting wildlife right on my front door (or in this case, my front fence); sharing the beautiful world around me through photography; relaxing in beautiful locations (a glass of wine can add to with happiness too!); living near the sea, and seeing the full moon bright on a clear night.  Fireworks!  Being high up; being in love, loving, and feeling loved; and I can’t go past a kitten for instant happiness, so here’s two!

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Near and Far

I really enjoy playing with near and far in my landscape photography.  Picking a tiny detail out of a sweeping background changes a pretty scene into something just that bit more unusual, and gives the viewer a sense of being in the landscape rather than just looking at it through a frame.  The knack is to spot that special something, then make sure that both your detail and your landscape are in focus.  I don’t always succeed with the latter, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

Near and a Bit Far

On the black sands near Jokulsarlon, Iceland, icebergs from the nearby glacier lake wash up on the shore, to be slowly beaten down back to the water they began life as a millennium ago.

Near and Quite Far

Almannaskarð is a high mountain pass on the east coast of Iceland, once considered the most dangerous part of the road than circles the country.  Nowadays a tunnel goes underneath the mountain, but if you have a tough car and a bit of bravery, you can still drive up to the highest point of the old pass and look out over the bay to the Vatnajokull glacier beyond.  In the car park is a sign quoting an Icelandic author, who states, “If you have not seen the view from Almannaskarð, you have not seen Iceland at all”.

The coastline and the flowers aren’t as sharp as I should have managed, but I like it anyway.

Near and Really Really Far

In the USA this time, in Utah.  This Canyonlands National Park, as viewed from Dead Horse State Park. Here the Colorado River and the red rock form a unique landscape that goes on forever.  I think I can be forgiven for not managing pin-sharp focus on the distant haze.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Free Spirit

It’s a bit of a cliché, but I love birds in flight, so I couldn’t pass up the symbolism here.

There are many free spirits of an avian nature in Iceland.  In Iceland, birds are the most common wildlife you’ll see, as swathes of barren landscape struggle to support any animal that can’t fish or fly to warmer climes in winter.

The graceful artic tern prepares to dive

This is the kind of photo I could play with for hours, creating different effects.  Silhouette or detail, enough contrast for the clouds or no, what colour for the background or leave it as grey?  I’ve settled on what you see above for now, but it changes every time I play with this one.

Geese over north-east Iceland

Another image I’ve had fun playing with.  Much of north-east Iceland is desert-like, ancient volcanoes slowly being eroded away into the otherwise flat landscape.  But there’s nowhere these free spirits can’t travel.

Free Spirits of Vestmannaeyjar

And of course, the ever-present seagulls.  Where there’s a coast, there’s a seagull or two… hundred.  Also, I can’t help but think that that must be the house of a free spirit.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Growth

Even the earth grows.

In Námaskarð, in the Myvatn region of north Iceland, hot earth bubbles out in the form of sulphurous mud and forms mini-mountains like this one.

Close by however, the acid mud burns deep holes into the ground.

Iceland is where the earth is built and destroyed beneath your very feet.  This showcase of the cycle of growth and decay, the cycle of all things in our universe including the very earth itself, is one of the reasons I love Iceland so.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Purple

Purple is one of my favourite colours, and one much under-rated I feel.

I’ve taken us back yet again to Iceland.  You’re probably sick of the place, but Iceland offers so much for the landscape photographer that I just can’t keep away.

Nootka Lupine

One thing you generally can’t say about Iceland’s landscape is that it’s particularly colourful.  In the winter, it’s gleaming white snow and bright blue skies, in the summer it’s black rock and dusty green vegetation.  The most common exception to this is the nootka lupine, or purple or Alaskan lupine.  Nootka lupine was introduced into Iceland during the 1940s to re-vegetate some Iceland’s barren soil, and now it carpets even areas that were thought inhospitable to all life.  It’s a weed, and it survives the freezing and dark conditions under metres of snow for six months or more to spring back every year in summer.

When I first saw nootka lupine, I fell in love with its contrasting purple and green colours, but now I know it’s quite controversial in Iceland.  Some love it for the same reasons I did and because it returns barren fields to life, others hate it as it’s changing the natural look of Iceland, as well as badly impacting native species of moss, lichen and low shrubs as it grows tall and crowded so it smothers them.  As much as I love the purple, I don’t really want all of Iceland to be under a purple carpet.  I hope nootka lupine remains just a purple accent on an otherwise stark canvas.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Dreaming

Do robots dream of electric sheep?

Taken near Hella, Iceland.  Next time I go aurora-hunting, I’m going to find a much more natural landscape to frame it, but here the juxtaposition of a human light with the most spectacular of nature’s light appealed to me.

 

A Question on Photography Etiquette

I had a small dilemma when I posted yesterday’s weekly photo challenge.  Something about the photo didn’t look as good as it could to me, then I realised – flip it horizontally, and suddenly, to my eyes, it works a whole lot better.

The original

Flipped

Do you prefer the original photo, or the flipped one?

Because of the way the eye flows over an image, it generally “feels” better to have the main subject on the right hand side of the frame, and empty space to the left. For this image, if you flip it, you also have the water flowing nicely away down to the right, in the direction of the eye’s flow.  Of course there are times when you want to challenge the viewer and go the other way, but I flip a lot of my photos to get that balance within the image right.

I do have exceptions.  Obviously you can’t flip anything with writing in it.  I’m not a big fan of flipping people, nor of striking landmarks.  Should I have flipped the photo of Goðafoss if it works better?  Who would know?  Even if you’ve seen Goðafoss, would you remember that the smaller waterfall in the corner of my shot is to the right as you face the main waterfall, not to the left?  If you did, would you care?  Regardless, is it wrong to misrepresent the real world?  I feel flipping the photo goes beyond enhancing the image to highlight the best of it into seriously changing it from reality, but is it really pretty much the same thing as upping the contrast?

I have a follow-on thought – I do wonder how much of this feeling of balance, with the main subject on the right and the water flowing out to the right, is due to the way Western languages have taught many of us to read.  If you grew up with a language that flows a different way, does the balance work differently?

Obviously this dilemma only arises in photography where the main aim is to capture the beauty of the real world as the naked eye sees it (admittedly, often a naked eye grovelling on the ground or perched perilously high on a chair!). There are thousands of other aims where representing the “real” world is completely irrelevant.