Day 331

I had to vacate the house this afternoon, because the estate agent was showing someone round. There's nowhere to go round here, so I usually just park up down the road, and sit in the car and read. It was far too hot today to sit in the car, so I sat in the shade under a tree, listened to an audiobook and took some  photos with the iPhone. I really enjoyed my chill-out time. :-)

Day 288

Today there was a rally past my house and the road was closed for most of the day. I wasn't interested in shooting the rally, and I didn't fancy staying at home and trying to work while all the noise was going on, so I decided to have a day out. First I went to yoga, then I went to the cinema and for lunch with a couple of friends, and finally I went for a photo walk alone around the park.

The weather was dark and drizzly, which wasn't ideal, but I got a few reasonable shots - enough to keep me busy processing images for the next few evenings.

I've had a really rough couple of days emotionally. I've felt almost as anxious, tearful and angry as I did immediately after Iain left. I'm not sure exactly what's precipitated this feeling, but I suppose it's only natural that making progress will sometimes involve taking one step forward and two steps back.

Day 265

Today was spinning and weaving, so I got a chance to take some photos of yet another lovely garden. I took 230 shots altogether, and ended up with 8 that were worth keeping and working on. I'll share the first four shots today, and the second four tomorrow.

I know the first photo is of an arum lily, but I have no idea what the others are. One part of me feels that I ought to learn the names of the plants I take photos of, and another part of me feels that you don't need to know the name of something to appreciate how beautiful it is.

Day 230

I took some photos today but none of them were good enough to share, so today's image is an old shot, which I've reworked. Having played around with the Tiny Planets app on the iPad, I wanted to learn how to create planet-style shots manually. One of my Flickr contacts told me about this tutorial on how to create your own planet-style images in Photoshop:

http://content.photojojo.com/tutorials/create-your-own-panorama-planets/

Following the instructions in the tutorial, I made this:

I got stuck on one bit of the instructions because the part of the menu I needed to access was greyed out, but after a lot of hair-pulling, I found that changing the image mode to 8 bits per channel fixed this problem.

I shall definitely be making some more of these!

Day 223

The light was so good when I got up this morning that I went straight outside for a photo shoot.

I was thrilled to get a nice, clear bird silhouette, but it was on a shot in which the light wasn't at its best, and the bird was in the wrong position in the frame. So in Photoshop I combined it with the best shot I got of the tree and the skyline.

I then switched to Lightroom for all the usual processing, including warming up the colour of the sky, as it looked too yellow in the original shot.

I was umming and ahhing about whether or not to erase the bush on the right, but in the end I decided to keep it, as I felt it added balance to the composition.

Day 221

The rain has stopped at long last, so Iain and I went on a photo walk round the local botanical gardens this afternoon.

Iain had the Canon, and I used the iPhone. Although Iain's not done much photography in the last twenty-five years, he used to be a keen photographer when he was a teenager, back in the days of black and white film. I'm gently trying to get him to catch 'the bug' again, because I think it would be a cool activity to do together. My long-term plan is to buy a higher-spec Canon, but keep the entry-level one. That way we can both use a dSLR all the time, and alternate days that we use the top-end one.

As you can probably tell, I edited these iPhone shots in Lightroom.

Day 179

This is a gulley on our neighbour's land, taken from the roadside.

Two of the cows on our land came up to investigate the house, so Pookie and I went out to say hello. Cows are daft. This cow was constantly getting whacked in the face by her friend's tail, but she didn't have the sense to move out of the way.

Day 176

Today was spinning and weaving, but I was too busy to be able to spend all day there, so I just popped round for an hour at lunch time. Before I left I took a few photos (of course!)

A heart in a tree:

A pump house, which looks more like a dunny (an outhouse toilet) to me!