An occasional Photo Blog
This evening my holiday draws to a close and so too does my Summer-fourteen project. Summer 2014 may not go down in history as the warmest or sunniest on record, and photography wise I have experienced more productive summers, but I’ve had fun and that’s surely what it’s all about. With these few alpine images, taken last Friday, I’ll wind up the summer project… and start looking forward to Autumn 🙂
Wife and I had been meaning to visit Bellinzona for quite some time, yesterday was the big day. With only three hours in the city we just had time for a pizza, a visit to the big castle (Castelgrande) and of course a coffee. Here are a few images.
With the summer holidays now over, today would normally mean the end of my summer project “Summer-fourteen”. However, because I am now on holiday I have decided to extend the project for a further week.
I’m not famous for my interest in sport, but even I couldn’t fail to notice that the European Athletics Championships were being held in Zurich. Although I stayed well away from the stadium, I did venture in to the city yesterday afternoon for a stroll around the “City Festival” which held various attractions and events and brought an athletic feeling to the city centre.
A week has passed since my last posting, and I’m quite pleased I didn’t commit myself to posting at least one photo per day or something similar. Not that photographic motivation is lacking, but I’ve been leaving the camera at home during the week and have had my nose buried deep in a book during the journey to and from work instead. Yesterday saw me once again pottering in the garden and subsequently relaxing with a beer and the K30 in the late afternoon sunshine. Perhaps I should have made an attempt to free the garage roof from all manner of plant life but somehow capturing images of it was far more fun.
So far I’ve been unable to confirm it on the internet, but I heard somewhere that onions shouldn’t see August rain. Being August 2nd. and sunny, a day in the garden was on the agenda and while I was making lots of noise mowing the grass (lawn would be an overstatement) and playing with the trimmer, wife was busily harvesting our onion crop and tackling a very healthy weed plantation. Before reclining in a deckchair with a cool beer I dutifully tied them in bunches and hung them up to dry.
As mentioned in ‘Summer-fourteen 7’, I’ve been experimenting with the myriad of settings on the K30. Yesterday’s onion photos and the couple of images taken this morning were captured using the ‘User’ settings which I’ve set up for B&W use. Increased contrast, yellow filter and one or two other goodies are now available at the turn of a dial, rendering the term ‘straight out of the camera’ quite meaningless. I’m not sure the digital yellow filter is as impressive as the glass filter used with film was all those years ago, but perhaps I need to experiment more and keep a look out for dramatic, characterful skies.
After a week of atypical summer weather it was very nice to take breakfast outside this morning and once again feel the need for lots of sun cream. Today is 1st August, a national holiday. A day of flag waving, barbecues and fireworks. Straight after breakfast (early afternoon) I took the dog and the Pentax for a leisurely stroll and then spent a little time basking in the sunshine and experimenting with a few camera settings which I’d never used before.
These two charachters seemed to enjoy the recent heavy rain enormously. Together with their slimy little friends they have happily eaten their way through most of our vegetables and flowers. For reasons known only to themselves, and perhaps a handful malacologists, they left all the weeds alone…. what a nice gesture.
It’s been a week since I last posted anything on the Summer-fourteen project and during the week there have been several missed sunny photo opportunities, but last week’s heatwave has now given way to quite a miserable weekend with temperatures struggling to reach twenty, so much for lazing around with a cool beer.
Today is definitely too wet to cut the lawn, weed or tackle all those other little garden jobs that would probably not have been tackled if the weather had been good either, so I decided to get the K30 nice and wet.
Today is Saturday. Having cut the hedge and mowed the lawn I decided to relax. If I were many years younger, today’s image would no doubt have been a selfie. So be thankful I’m not!
My daily walk to work takes me past a very large building site. It resembled a very large crater for months, then cranes suddenly appeared, about thirteen of them, and from the depths of the crater walls are quickly emerging.
