The power of connecting

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art, black and white, blogging101, photo101, Photography, photography101, Postaday

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. – William Plomer

Sibling connection

Day six on Photography 101 and we were asked to share a photo using our own interpretation of  the word connect and then look at how we tag the post, being used to social media on Flickr and Instagram I have been tagging my photos for years so this I did not find too much of a challenge.

Well connect can mean a lot of things, so the option for photographic subjects was very wide today. The dictionary definitions I found were:

• to join, link, or fasten together; unite or bind
• to establish communication between; put in communication
• to have as an accompanying or associated feature
• to cause to be associated, as in a personal or business relationship
• to associate mentally or emotionally
• to link to an electrical or communications system; hook up
• to become connected; join or unite
• (of trains, buses, etc.) to run so as to make connections
• to have or establish successful communication; make contact
• to relate to or be in harmony with another person, one’s work, etc.
• (of an addict or drug dealer) to make direct contact for the illegal sale or purchase of narcotics
• to hit successfully or solidly ie a ball in sport
• of or relating to a connection or connections

Connection point

Connecting with a friend

The Sail bridge – connecting either side of a river

Well day six on Blogging 101 asked us to look at our own about pages, which I did. Being quite introverted, I am not very good at talking about myself, so found doing this quite difficult. It took me ages just to write my first post on here back in January, as I kept writing things down and then wondering to myself, do I really want to share this much with everyone, after all I am a very private family orientated person.

Do my amendments make it more enticing, I am not sure, but at least I have looked at it and amended it, I guess that was the aim of todays task! What do you think?

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The beauty of the Jurassic

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art, blogging101, Dorset, journal, Lifestyle, photo101, Photography, photography101, Postaday, Project Life

Fishing

A path well trodden

❤

❤

On top of the world

Dodging the waves

Crashing waves

Dead slow

The view

❤

Coastline view

The end of the day

In the Photography 101 course for this weekend there were no themes, but the task was to capture some wide angle shots, what could be better than landscapes. After shooting it was suggested we create a gallery of our photos (see above). I do not usually upload my photos to WordPress, instead choosing to link to my Flickr account where I have unlimited storage, so I am not sure I will do that many galleries on my blog due to the limited storage on the free accounts.

I just love the Jurassic Coastline in Dorset and East Devon it is England’s first natural World Heritage Site. It is a unique stretch of coastline which sits amongst the ranks of the Great Barrier Reef and the Grand Canyon as one of the wonders of the natural world! The site was granted its status for its outstanding geology, which represents 185 million years of earth history in just 95 miles, covering from Exmouth in East Devon to Old Harry Rocks at Studland Bay on the Dorset coast. Over the many years that I have visited I have walked much of this coastline now though I am going to start photographing it too. Whilst visiting this time we walked from Burton Bradstock to West Bay along the beach and then back along the cliffs. Burton Bradstock acts as one of the main gateways to the Jurassic Coast and the South West Coastal Path. Hive Beach and the famous Hive Beach Cafe (if you like fish or ice-creams it is a wonderful place to have a rest), is a hugely popular family destination, made up of shingle, surrounded by spectacular sandstone cliffs. It forms part of the larger Chesil Beach; which is the largest shingle ridge in the world. Burton Cliffs offer one of the finest examples of the distinctive, alternate hard and soft layered geology of this Bridport Sands area, which make it appear to glow bright gold in the sunlight. Regular rock falls often expose some important and fascinating fossils, such as ammonites, recognised by their ribbed spiral-formed shell, my kids have found a few ammonites and sharks teeth here during our many visits, although the best ones and most well preserved can be found at Charmouth. (They just love the kids playground at West Bay after the long walk too!). There is a faultline at Hive Beach and the cliffs to the east of the fault change to the grey cliffs made up of clay and Fullers Earth. Burton Cliff though is similar to East Cliff at West Bay and the central part the Bridport Sands are topped by Inferior Oolite which is capped with a layer of Fuller’s Earth. The beach at Burton Bradstock is near the western end of the Chesil Beach and is made up of fine shingle. There has though been substantial loss of beach at Burton Cliffs as the fine shingle is moved from west to east by the long shore drift as a result of the prevailing south westerly winds and tides. Unfortunately and renewal of the beach shingle from the west is prevented by the harbour piers at West Bay, Bridport. The coastal sea level of central southern England is rising at an increased rate and in general the low water mark is moving higher inland causing beach narrowing or beach steepening. Because of this, there is no longer the large quantity of fine shingle that there used to be in front of Burton Cliff. Geologists think that over time the beach at Burton Cliff will eventually disappear and it will therefore become a rocky coast with the sea breaking onto the cliffs.

For any of you that have watched the TV show “Broadchurch” with David Tennant and Olivia Coleman, this was filmed here (I saw parts of both of these being filmed on visits to the coastline).

All of the photos above were edited in Lightroom and I then added my watermark in Photoshop CC.

Those blissful moments when…………..

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art, photo101, Photography, photography101, Postaday

“Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.” – Deepak Chopra

The prompt for day four of Photography101 was the prompt of “Bliss and captions”, I already used captions on my photos so have not changed that at all.

Although I know the meaning of the word, I decided to look it up in a dictionary and this is what I found:

Noun: perfect happiness; great joy

Verb(informal): reach a state of perfect happiness, oblivious of everything else.

Love of reading

I have a quiet few moments reading a good book.

Listening to music

I listen and get engaged in music.

Holiday bliss

I am on holiday with my family, visiting far away places and enjoying sights and sounds away from home.

Watching the sun go down

I am watching the sunset over the sea with my loved ones.

Hot latte on a cold day

I am sitting relaxing with a coffee after shopping trip (not my favourite thing to do at all, so a coffee is what I look forward to).

The list could go on, but I think you probably get the gist; my idea of bliss is when I am not at work and have time to relax or spend time with my family. I think that is probably why I enjoy photography so much as it gives me the “me” time that everyone needs every now and then.

How would you interpret the word bliss in a photo?

Water water everywhere

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art, blogging101, photo101, Photography, photography101, reflection, Surrey, UK, water

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. – W. H. Auden

Splashing fun

Living in England means that water is not far from home wherever you are, so when I saw the prompt for today on Photography101 I smiled as I knew exactly what I wanted to post for today. I love photographing water whether it is water splashes as can be seen above, photos where water is just part of the whole scene (Thames reflection, below), photos where reflections form part of the shot (reflections, below) or even where the photo is just a pure reflection (reflections of you, below).

I found it very useful contemplating the photo tip today of photo orientation and the fact that “humans have binocular vision — which means we have two eyes, adjacent to one another — and naturally scan a scene along a horizontal, rather than vertical, plane”. It got me thinking, I do have a habit of shooting horizontally most of the time and this will always be the orientation I start with, except for portraits or when I shoot wildlife in my garden that is, then I automatically start with vertical. When I shot the top two photos I intentionally shot horizontally as the scenes I knew would not look quite the same and would have lost the “feel” of what I had envisaged if they had been shot vertically and I would have lost too much of the scene. The bottom two though, I did shoot with both orientations at the time, but just preferred the look of the horizontal photos.

As I have been taking photos for a long time now I do naturally now try and establish a scene, making sure that there is a focal point (usually using one of the compositional rules) but not always, sometimes I just go with what I feel works (sometimes it is good to break the rules!).

Thames reflections

Reflections

Reflections of you

The task for today on blogging101 was to follow five new topics in the reader and five new blogs, well I have already done the latter today and found some new blogs that I am really looking forward to seeing each time they post. Topic wise, I already follow photography, art, scrapbooking, books, family and history as well as blogging101 and photo101, now I am off to find five new topics to follow. Do you have any favourites that you look at all the time, I would love to hear your choices?

Coming to life

Tags

art, blogging101, photo101, Photography, photography101, street photography

Well two posts in one day, that is definitely a first for me! I do not plan to do this all the time (but maybe for this month 😮 , as I take part in two WordPress courses – blogging and photography101 to kick start me into posting regularly).

I drove to this town straight after dropping my children at school to take some photos for todays theme on Photography101 which is “Street & establishing shots”. It was such a gloomy morning, as can be clearly seen in first two photos with the nondescript grey skies, as my editing skills are not up to changing the sky (just yet) I had to leave them as shot, with a little post processing in Lightroom.

Driving by

Quiet time

As I wondered into the main shopping area and had a coffee at Costa, mainly to bide a little time, the people started to arrive and the town started to come alive. All the photos below were taken within 5 minutes as I walked around the main high street area. I decided to make a quick collage of the photos I snapped, it was fun and I think I will revisit doing this at some point, but spend a little longer planning my photos. I converted all of these to black and white as I preferred all of them edited this way and thought it tied them in quite well in the collage.

Street Life

Since starting this blog in January, I have played about with themes, the tagline and title, so I do not have a specific post for the assignment in blogging101 today. I thought a long time about the title for my blog and setting it all up before I went live, so am (at the moment) happy with how it is, but who knows in time, as I grow and learn more, I may change it again, who knows!

Macro Monday: the Gerbera edition

Tags

art, blogging101, fine art, macro, photo101, Photography, photography101

I have decided to do both the Photography101 and blogging101 course, my blogging about me and why I have decided to blog can be found HERE. The Photography101 prompt today is “home” and what it means to us, well for me home is the place that I tend to take most of my photos as I work full time and have two children who have very active social lives. I tend to spend most of my free time running them here there and everywhere in between this I can be found taking photos on the kitchen table, in the garden, of my kids etc etc, but the common theme is that most are taken at home.

The Gerbera is a genus of ornamental plants from the sunflower family (Asteraceae). It was named in honour of the German botanist and naturalist Traugott Gerber. They are very popular and widely used as a decorative garden plant or as cut flowers. It is the fifth most used cut flower in the world (after rose, carnation, chrysanthemum, and tulip).