sky

I love the sky and the endless variety - I seem to have taken a lot of sky pictures lately.
Here are a few of my favourites.

inspiration...

I am in awe of the ability of some photographers to see the world from perspectives that I fail to see for myself. Pixibition by Poramit and Michael Singer's a visual notebook are a real inspiration. I try to be open-minded but often really struggle to not be obvious.





This picture was taken just before the picture of cones on atypical. I am pleased with both of them - they are the sort of thing I mean, along with the Sainsbury's shot a few days ago.

coneflower

I have not been taking many pictures of flowers in the garden recently.
This is for 3 main reasons -
1 - I took a lot last year and feel like I'm repeating myself.
2 - the new lens has a low success rate - I take get one good photo from about every 10 I take.
3 - Being at home and in the mood at a time when the weather is right - if it's windy it is VERY hard to get good photos with the lens at 1:1 close-up as the depth of field is so small. I took a few yesterday - in the wind, but with late sun. Only a couple turned out - one of which was this.... echinacea or coneflower just coming into bloom.



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sky over Sainsbury's

Tone and I have just come home from a weekend T'ai Chi for beginners course. I am feeling very dozy. It was challenging, fun and cleared my mind rather successfully.
On our way home we called at the supermarket for the ingredients to make our own ice cream and nice things for tea with our friend Kim.
We had the camera with us, as Tone took some photos of the teacher and the class - which I guess he will post later to either bloghawk or atypical.

sky over Sainsbury's
Originally uploaded by atypicalblog.

I saw this photo on the car park - I like the dynamic angles of the porch against the sky. It is a hot bright day. I don't usually like supermarket architecture - and the rest of this shop is a large corrogatedmetal shed - but this feature drew my attention today.

grass

grassbw[1]
Originally uploaded by atypicalblog.

Well... this is my first time with flickr - Tone and I sat together for hours tonight setting up an account and uploading pictures. I needed to test it out before going to bed. I chose this one as it's black and white - it was taken with the D70.

flickr is grt!

Gormley

On friday night our neighbours came round for a meal - then they moved house yesterday to a place about half an hour away. We will miss them all - Dawn, Andrew, Jacob and Alysha.

On Saturday though we had a cheery day visiting Ness gardens with Jude and Alastair. The gardens were mildly disappointing although we took quite a few snaps. So, we went across to Liverpool under the tunnel (aaaggghhhh - don't like long tunnels much!), to Crosby. There is an amazingly splendiforous art installation by Antony Gormley of Angel of the North fame there.


Gormley

It's one hundred iron casts of the artist standing upright facing the sea, placed along the 3 km beach.... and we have posted some pictures here already to give you a sense of it. Take a look at these websites for more info - BBC, Visit Liverpool, Sefton Coast, The Lightbox, and get yourselves down/ up there from wherever you are - especially if you are into photography - it's very inspiring with the industry, the beach, the Wirral and North Wales mountains in the distance and then the fantastic figures.