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Graffiti by: Kid30 | Smallkid. Design agency in Nottingham.
Midlands based artist kid30 (smallkid) has been painting graffiti for over two decades. Known for his cleanly painted bold characters. His recent work focusing on mash ups of favourite cartoon characters from his childhood. He is also a member of the Oxygen Thievez and is based in Spit & Sawdust, a mini gallery he runs in Nottingham.
Album: Signs
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No Group Awards/Banners, thanks.
Contrasting colours of Myrtle leaves. Myrtus, with the common name myrtle, is a genus of flowering plants in the family Myrtaceae, described by Swedish botanist Linnaeus in 1753. Over 600 names have been proposed in the genus, but nearly all have either been moved to other genera or been regarded as synonyms. The genus Myrtus has three species recognised today: Myrtus communis – Common myrtle; native to the Mediterranean region in southern Europe; Myrtus nivellei – Saharan myrtle; native to North Africa; Myrtus phyllireaefolia. Myrtus communis is widely cultivated as an ornamental plant for use as a shrub in gardens and parks. It is often used as a hedge plant, with its small leaves shearing cleanly. 2379
Recently we had freezing rain fall to the ground after several days of light snow. I was especially excited about the prospect of sliding across the frozen spots to capture what I could of this special landscape I call my garden. One of my favorite authors has a quotation I felt enhanced this image.."Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays."
Haruki Murakami
Kayla couldn’t hide her satisfaction—Adrienne had taken to the VDD with uncanny ease. Over the past few days, they’d leapt across countless locations, Adrienne increasingly taking the lead.
“You’re doing fantastic,” Kayla said with a wide smile, watching Adrienne recalibrate after a particularly sharp reentry.
Adrienne let out a disbelieving laugh. “It’s all so clear. Like muscle memory... like I was doing this just yesterday.”
Kayla nodded. “Some knowledge runs deeper than memory.”
Kayla poured two glasses of wine, took a drink from one and handed the other glass to Adrienne.
“But we haven’t touched time travel yet,” Adrienne added, frowning. “I’m not sure I understand how that works.”
Kayla sipped her wine. “That’s... complicated,” Kayla admitted, her tone shifting. “To be honest, I’m not sure we even fully grasped it when you were one of us before.”
Adrienne tilted her head, curious.
“Time isn’t a straight line,” Kayla continued. “It doesn’t move cleanly from past to present to future. Think of it like a thick, folded blanket—layers compressed together. That fold… we call it the quantum fold. Past, present, future—they’re all happening at once.”
She tapped her VDD lightly. “With this, we can access straight through those layers. But here’s where it gets trickier: an infinite number of alternate timelines are stacked on top of each other. It’s easy to become lost. You must always remember to set a home beacon on your VDD whenever you time travel.”
Adrienne blinked. “So… multiverses. Like in the movies.”
“Yes—and no,” Kayla replied. “Time travel is incredibly dangerous. Especially moving backward. One small misstep, and you might erase yourself. Or worse—change something you never meant to.”
Adrienne gave a short nod. “Yeah, I’ve seen
how that goes in sci-fi.”
“What about other dimensions?” she added. “Are those the same as alternate timelines?”
“Not even close,” Kayla said. “Dimensions aren’t timelines—they’re entirely separate realms. Parallel realities that exist beside ours, unseen but present.”
A flicker of something unreadable crossed her face. “They’re… strange. Some harbor things we have names for—Bigfoot, spirits, demons. Others defy explanation. Not all are safe. A few are.”
Adrienne’s eyes widened slightly. “That’s why—when we escaped the reptiles—you took us between dimensions?”
Kayla nodded once. “Between is a safe zone, one that is neither here nor there.”
Adrienne studied her, catching a stray thought that hadn’t been meant for sharing.
She hesitated. “Kayla… why were you sent here?”
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You can view Quantum Fold episodes in order from the beginning in her album titled, Quantum Fold:
www.flickr.com/photos/199076397@N02/albums/72177720326169...
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This is an A.I. image generated using my SL avi.
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FR : Ecureuil roux
Arboretum de Chèvreloup-Versailles (78)
Imparfaite techniquement (très léger flou de bougé), car lorsqu'on est réglé seulement à 800 ISO et en priorité diaph à f.16 (puisque préparé à photographier des paysages, mais pas des animaux) et qu'on a moins d'une poignée de secondes pour déclencher, donc sans un seul espoir de pouvoir modifier les réglages, on n'a plus vraiment le choix… Il faut composer vite et proprement, ajuster la mise au point sur le monstre, et surtout avoir la main ferme au moment du tir, car on sait qu’on n’aura pas de deuxième chance…
Une seconde après, l'animal, dont on perçoit dans son regard qu’il est surpris (et pas forcément réjoui) par ma présence, était déjà en haut de l'arbre !
Et pourtant, j'ai un compte bancaire à la Caisse d'Epargne depuis plus de cinquante ans… Conclusion : Ces bêtes-là n'ont aucun respect pour les clients fidèles !
EN: Red squirrel
Arboretum of Chèvreloup-Versailles (78)
Technically imperfect (slight blur of motion), because when you are set to 800 ISO and in priority diaph at 16 (because I was expecting to photograph landscapes, and not animals) and you have less than a couple of seconds to trigger, so without being able to change the settings, you no longer have a choice, you have to compose quickly and cleanly and, above all, keep a firm hand!
A second later, the animal, surprised by my presence, was already at the top of the tree!
Penn Station Gateway to Seventh Avenue. In the new hall, lighting from over 360 color-changing LED ceiling panels creates a luminous glow with the aim of complementing daylight that illuminates the space.
The new LED ceiling is the “crown jewel” of the expansion. It’s the centerpiece that gives you the feeling of natural light,”. Those LED panels really give you an opportunity to give it much more of an open feel. That cramped feeling just doesn’t exist anymore.
Nikon Z8 14-30MM Ultra Wide Angle
---HSS----
I had to rebuild the right corner after Photoshop remove tools couldn't get a distraction out cleanly and completely. That involved a gradient and a few tools to make it look almost seamless. .. Thanks Tom
A pair of new CPKC painted Tier 4 GE’s lead 112 around Morant’s Curve on a gray June afternoon. Unless some major tree trimming efforts are undergone by Parks Canada in the next year or so, this location will become almost impossible to cleanly shoot from the overlook without hiking up the hill.
Tiny Warbler, the size of a Goldcrest, and quite a challenge to get cleanly, because it rarely pauses for breath. Portesham, Dorset.
Large duck with a sleek body and thin red bill. Breeding males have a dark green head and mostly white body with peachy blush on underparts. Females and immature males have rusty brown head and gray bodies with a cleanly demarcated white throat. Feeds in rivers, lakes, and large ponds by diving to catch fish. Hardy in winter, often staying as far north as open water permits.
“Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way - cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: Twenty-Four Stories
- Herodotus.
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We only spend a morning at the eastern part of the Saguaro national park while visiting Southern Arizona. Compared to the western part of the park, it didn’t have many options to entertain a grumpy three-year-old. While we were there only for sunrise, the park didn’t disappoint. The sunrise was epic, even though we were caught on the wrong side of the loop road. We also saw many coyote cubs and some genuinely massive saguaros.
When the colors peaked during sunrise, we drove through a valley with a mountain to the east. There only a few areas to pull over, so finding a good viewpoint before the light was disappeared was not an option. I was desperately searching for a beautiful cactus and found one, but it was located towards the west while the colors stayed on the eastern part of the sky. Thankfully I found one before the brilliant sky faded, but it didn’t standout as cleanly as some of the cacti on the western side. Unfortunately, this one had a plant growing right next to it. I was disappointed but didn’t want to miss the colors, searching for the perfect saguaro.
Don't be fooled into thinking more is always better.
Well it's complicated -
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw8RCIBmbNc
This video is a good start to understanding what’s going on.
(but even this guy is conservative in his opinion of how big an image you can get cleanly).
Its not a matter of just resolution -
(think about how the image will be viewed, on a phone screen or on a huge advertising hoarding).
This image was taken on an old Olympus E-PL3 that has only 12 Megapixels with a fairly cheap 14mm Panasonic lens stood under a normal ceiling light. Now do you rally need 60 megapixels?
Be an image creator - not a camera collector.
Saviez vous comment nous tenons notre graine
pour la manger délicatement entre nos pattes, sans en perdre une miette..?
regardez en GRAND,/
Did you know how we hold our seed
to eat it delicately between our paws, without losing a crumb..?
look BIG
Thank you for your visits, compliments and stars..!
Merci à vous pour vos visites, compliments et étoiles..!
Taken in February in Coverdale one of the most attractive dales in the Yorkshire dales national park. I know the colours look odd but this shot is SOOC the sun was going down so there are very strong shadows on the hillsides. Also new grass was coming but rather patchily so there are small areas of strong green. I liked the way the strong but low sun brought out the shapes and contours of the moorland hills and you can see cleanly the paths of the small hill streams
THANKS FOR YOUR VISIT HAVE A GREAT DAY
“Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way - cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays.”
― Haruki Murakami
"ice contains no future , just the past, sealed away. As if they're alive, everything in the world is sealed up inside, clear and distinct. Ice can preserve all kinds of things that way- cleanly, clearly. That's the essence of ice, the role it plays."
Haruki Murakami
Second image in a mini series on Gulls...
This Ring-billed gull flies directly overhead and we look into those pretty yellow and black eyes. Click a couple times on it and you'll see the eyes even clearer.
This species of gull is by far the most common gull on the Great Lakes. Along with Herring Gulls, the Ring-billed Gulls fill all of North America with their scavenging presence and their ubiquitous cries.
Some people don't like Gulls very much, but I surely do. I cut my teeth on birds-in-flight photography by practicing hours on end to capture them cleanly as they flew by me.
The image you see above is the result of 14 years of practice and passion. And I still learn something new everytime I go out on a photowalk/photoshoot :)
My beloved Mamiya RB67 SD is a purely mechanical medium format camera of the heavy variety. With the prism viewfinder it weighs an impressive 3.5 kg... Why I'm willing to lug it around: It's simply wonderful to take photos with it. It's almost as if it finds the subject itself. Somehow it teaches me to work precisely and cleanly. I love it very much.
This year's firefly walk started on June 6th and ended on July 23rd. We saw between one and ten fireflies every night, but the number was much less than last year.
However, we were lucky enough to get to know a female firefly teacher of the same age who has been doing firefly walks for over 20 years, and an old man who works on the farm at night to avoid the heat of the day.
It was also the first time that we saw firefly larvae glowing at the bottom of a small stream. The larvae will come up to the shore next spring and pupate in the soil, and will become adults and start glowing again in June. We look forward to seeing the fireflies again next year.
There are two streams in our firefly habitat. One is from the golf course, and the other is from the natural forest of an old shrine. Fireflies used to live in both streams, but recently there are only fireflies in the stream from the shrine. This is thought to be due to the chemicals used to manage the grass and other vegetation on the golf course. Also, if the waterside is too cleanly weeded, the fireflies will disappear.🌲🌻🌸🐦🐦
Why did I photograph it like this? Well I was at a car show and to the left and right there were many distractions and I try my best to compose my shots cleanly so sometimes I just have to cut parts of things off but I happen to like this. I really love the way orange and green looks on this Fujicolor Superia X-Tra 400 film. It looks nice to me.
Is this what the kids today call Vanlife? ;)
Unrelated....I had to delete many images from my Flickr account because of the posting limits. I don't know if I feel comfortable paying another $77 for Flickr Pro right now when I'm not actively shooting currently. So I went through and deleted some old photos that didn't have any attention or photos I simply no longer liked.
spéciale dédicace squareman
transdimensional portal which opened as we were there, I barely had the time to take a picture before it close cleanly cutting the box in half, Brussels is a dangerous place !
We are good at creation. We build upwards, strong and powerful structures to sustain our way of life. Not always pretty, not always cleanly but we build.
Canon EOS 3
Canon EF 50mm 1.4
Ilford HP5 Plus
From above, a snowfall turns Canterbury into a pale mosaic of roofs and lanes, and the Cathedral Precincts read as a great cleared island within the tighter grain of the city. The cathedral’s long rooflines and transepts take the snow cleanly, while the great central tower rises as the anchor point, a vertical statement in the middle of the plan. Even in winter, the building’s scale is unmistakable: a church designed to be seen from every approach, and to draw the eye in the same way it has drawn travellers for centuries.
Canterbury Cathedral is one of the oldest and most important centres of Christianity in England. The story begins in AD 597 when Augustine arrived and established a church here, laying the foundations of what became the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. After the Norman Conquest, a vast new cathedral was begun under Archbishop Lanfranc in the 1070s, setting the basic footprint of the medieval building. Over time, that Norman core was reworked and extended into the richly layered cathedral we recognise today.
Few events shaped its fame more than the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in the cathedral in 1170. Becket’s shrine quickly became one of Europe’s great pilgrimage destinations, and Canterbury entered the wider imagination as a place of journey and devotion, a reputation later echoed in Chaucer’s tales of travellers heading for the shrine. A fire in 1174 led to a major rebuilding of the choir, pushing the architecture forward into a new Gothic language that still defines much of the cathedral’s interior character.
The tower often called Bell Harry is the cathedral’s late-medieval flourish: the central crossing tower completed in the late 15th century, rising above the meeting of nave and transepts and giving Canterbury its distinctive skyline. In this aerial view, winter makes the geometry easier to read: the long nave, the broad transepts, the clustered chapels and courts of the precincts, and the city pressing close around the walls. The scaffolding visible in the scene is a reminder that a building this old is never truly “finished” – it is continually maintained, repaired and handed on, season after season.
For Macro Mondays theme 'Less Than an Inch'.
The image shows a portion of a very small feather I picked up some while ago on the seashore. It was shot with my macro lens plus three extension tubes, as a ten-shot focus stack. The feather almost certainly comes from an oystercatcher, a pretty black and white species of seabird that is common around here. The feather was very unusual in that it was cleanly divided into a black side and a white side by the central rachis of the feather.
Steller's sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus) is a large diurnal bird of prey in the family Accipitridae. A sturdy eagle, it has dark brown plumage with white wings and tail, and yellow beak and talons. On average, it is the heaviest eagle in the world, at about 5 to 9 kg (11 to 20 lb), but may be below the harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) and Philippine eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi) in some standard measurements.
BOP show. Juvenile. Cropped at bottom couldn't remove the jesses cleanly.
Peaceful Mountain 276, 176, 22
Boundaries of the Soul: Part 2
Problem:
In the concrete canyons of a large city, the human soul still craves contact with nature.
Solution:
Plant a stand of trees down the sidewalk
Like exclamation points
Springing from the concrete
Thin things
Protruding through holes in cement
Equidistant from each other.
See how the landscaper
Ingeniously
Has split each square of sidewalk
By two diagonals
Into four perfect triangles
And cleanly sliced an arc
From the center point of each
Leaving
A circle
Just large enough to contain
A slender trunk
As if to say, “This is how much you are allowed to grow. No more.”
© Penny Lundquist, 2022
It was an over and under steal for WWCC's Alex Bonczyk as Miles' Ben Sansaver leaps and extends for the throw from the Pioneers catcher and allows Bonczyk to dive cleanly to the bag. Sansaver couldn't get a handle on the wide throw and Bonczyk extended the steal to 3rd during 1st inning action of the first game Saturday afternoon at WWCC.
This photo was taken by my daughter during her school’s hockey game, and she sent it to me right after capturing the moment. She told me it was one of her favorite shots of the match, and I can see exactly why. I’m genuinely impressed by how she managed to freeze such a dynamic movement so cleanly the timing, the balance on the ice, and the energy of the play all come together in a way that feels alive.
I’m sharing it here not only because it’s a solid sports-action photograph, but also because it means something to me. It’s a moment she was proud of, and I’m proud to see the game through her perspective. Watching her interest in photography grow like this makes me smile.
I’ve often thought that the cameras and lenses I’ve collected over the years might someday have their chance to go out and capture beautiful moments through her eyes and perhaps this is the beginning of that
Photographed at La Minga Ecolodge near Cali in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, this juvenile Green Honeycreeper (Chlorophanes spiza) perched briefly on a pale branch, giving me just enough time to work with the soft forest light. The green plumage shows the early stages of its transition toward the brighter blue tones of an adult male, and the yellow along the bill stands out cleanly against the smooth background. The evenly diffused light helped maintain detail across the feathers while keeping the surroundings quiet and unobtrusive.
From a technical perspective, the scene required patience. The bird moved quickly between branches, so I focused on positioning and timing, waiting for a moment when it stepped into open light and held still. The long focal length created natural background separation, and the gentle tones of the forest helped build a balanced frame without distraction. For me, this image reflects how small shifts in light and posture can reveal the early stages of growth in a species that is often seen only in motion.
©2025 Adam Rainoff Photographer
Alas, this chocolate heart did not cut as cleanly as I wished.
Dedicated to those for whom the 14th of February is just another day on the calendar.
(Time shifted from 2 Jun)
Since I'm in a venting mood tonight, I think I'll get as good as I give.
I'm "fully" out only to a few people. Up to now, I've only told a few people on flickr who didn't already realise this. I'm out to anyone on my daily Facebook page (I have a second one for high school classmates that I visit once in a blue moon.) But in everyday life, the number who know I'm gay is small.
I never came out, officially, to my mom. She knows though; it isn't "she suspects", but she found my Playgirl magazines when I was fifteen, and basically said (at the time) that it didn't matter if I were gay or not. But we don't discuss it. My grandmother probably knows, but I've never actually told her (and given trust issues I have with her now, never will.)
I am not out to my father, any of my siblings, or anyone else on either side of my family. My decision is cultural: I've grown up with my aunts and uncles regaling everyone else with tales of "sodomites" being stoned to death in Jamaica. Even my favourite aunt, the one who lives in gay-friendly Canada -- and who made a wedding cake for the straight son of her longtime lesbian coworker, and went to that same wedding -- has spoken with derision of things that happen every June at Church and Wellesley.
I'm not the only one in my family. I have a first cousin who is nine years my junior who is also not out. She is a bright, hard-working, fairly independent woman who hangs with her other, younger, cousins. Her father (my mother's brother) is one of those who believes that sodomites practise death. Yeah.
I'm no trailblazer. I have a lot of chicken-shit genes in me, and I have no clue where they come from because almost everyone in my family is cantankerous to the point of fisticuffs at times -- male and female.
But all is not lost. I have "officially" come out to a few. The hardest so far was my best friend. My best friend is someone who I've known since junior high. We went to high school and university together, and if I truly need anything at all, I can pick up the phone. But it wasn't until November of 2008 when I came out to him, well, sorta...
I was over at his house for dinner with him and his wife. His wife, a woman I love dearly and probably just this side of Gloria Steinem, remarked that she had known me for five years and never really knew me. She's very determined: she persisted to find out why I seemed so sad and asked if I wanted to say anything. She smartly asked if her husband should leave the room. And we talked for five minutes and I came out to her first. She summoned him back into the room and I told him. I remember not actually using the words "gay", "homosexual", etc. "Chris, you know your friend Darin who you used to know, and Jason (our mutual friend who came out to me in 2003)? I'm like them." That's how I said it. He then revealed a secret of his own, one I won't reveal here -- it's nunya. My coming out probably filled in a few gaps in his mind (twice now I can recall him trying to open the closet door for me and me not walking through), and his secret filled in gaps in my mind especially relating to him and his wife.
I know by making this admission to flickr-ites that some will judge me harshly. Others will understand. Some will just be puzzled by everything. A few won't even care. But, it is what it is.
Despite my own experience, I know -- cranially -- that being out and open is more healthy for the heart and soul than not. HOWEVER, I know that life never works that cleanly. I know I probably will never come out to my father or most of my family. (Again, I know I will be looked down on for this.)
But, when I said I'd share my life with people on flickr, warts and all, I meant it.
That's about it.
In September 2023 I will showcase a build in Billund, Lego house. This one will be a part of it. I am going to expand it to the right and it will be much larger, too.
You can see there's nothing totally new here; for Billund I don't experiment but try to put together some of my trademarks and stuff from my most like models. I try to merge "Medieval texture madness" and "Lavender Dream". Well, time will tell.
Thanks a lot to Robert (Hellboy) for the printed wod parts that I used for the bridge.
The editing/picture is pretty bad in certain spots as I had a white background but replaced it with a dark one. Spots that are blurry because of the aperture are impossible to be edited cleanly as it's impossible to tell where the tree ends and the background begins as both blend into each other. So just do me a favour and don't zoom in :-)
When I was following it around the white pine, it was staying fairly low, but we had an understanding of where too close was too close. The real trick here was getting a space with enough openings to see the whole bird cleanly.
Choices in life. Don't know what got me thinking of this today. What do you pick?
The Rock, cool and hard on the outside. Unforgiving.
But how do we know it doesn’t have a little heart inside, full of emotion, thoughts and fears? I like the feel of the rock in my hand.
The Paper, warm, crumples easily, the creases of time visible like ageing skin, across the indelible words that ramble a story of life, and laughter and fun. I’m at home with paper and pen
Or do I pick a fight with the Scissors that strive to part all it catches, cleanly or savagely, for it cares not. It cuts and tears. And can lead to tears. Hmmm. I’ve felt their sharpness before.
I could pick any of these and be a winner. Or a loser. But I'm determined to win, for I know I'll cheat if I have to with rock in one hand and paper in the other, I'll make peace with scissors. I'll find a way!
This image is included in 2 galleries:- 1) "Favourite Landscapes" curated by MK Hardy and 2) "INTERPHOTO: NATURE / LANDSCAPES / WILDLIFE" by Marzetti Gianfranco.
Facing Bass Strait, Sorrento Back Beach is one of the most photogenic parts of the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, Australia. It is 62 km south of Melbourne and 8 km from Point Nepean at the end of the peninsula.
The sky is cleanly blue except for a small cluster of lazy white clouds in the distant left. The Pulpit Rock, near the centre, shines like a castle in the blue sea water.
Bowing out this Christmas with a scene I last visited a year ago, it was fun to revisit Regent Street to capture its festive lights. The image was shot early on a calm but very cold morning, when the usually frantic shopping street was empty except for occasional traffic.
In comparison with my last take, my aim with this image was a darker and moodier tone, but also an image that placed greater emphasis on the light installation overhead, which this year echoes the street's first Christmas decorations in 1954, at the time taking the form of traditional angels. This year's installation by James Glancy Design stretches from one end of Regent Street to the other. Each of the 16 spirits has been beautifully sculpted and studded with shimmering gold and blue LED lights, which alternate and scroll to give the impression that the spirits' wings are continuously extending and folding away.
The challenge when shooting them is they're lightweight, and, even on a morning with only a gentle breeze, the mesh making up the spirits' garlands was constantly swaying in the wind. I overcame this by trading a higher ISO and wider aperture for a faster shutter speed, shooting again and again until I'd captured the empty street with a sharp take on the light installation. After this, I focused on photographing the traffic, predominantly taller double-decker buses, which I blurred into light trails with shutter speeds of two, three and four seconds. This gave me a variety of colours and styles of light trails to work with, and at the editing stage I was able to select the trails that conveyed the most vibrance and visual impact.
The street itself was a combination of nine bracketed exposures, allowing me to cleanly blend detail in the street's shadows with controlled highlights inside the shop windows using luminosity masks in Photoshop. I then used the Pen Tool to isolate the reservation between the roads, blending in brighter exposures with a radial gradient mask to emphasise how the light installation overhead was casting a glow on the ground beneath it. I used a combination of Colour Balance, Selective Colour and Hue/Saturation layers to accentuate the golden tones in the spirits' lights, while toning down the warmer tones along the street itself and applying a gentle Gradient Map set to Soft Light to bring out the chilly tones in the shadows. After this, I blended in the light trails I'd captured from more than 50 buses, pushing towards orange and red tones to complement the blue of the spirits and the street, trying to find a balance on both sides of the road between height, length and intensity, and at the same time also trying to ensure that the rich detail of the architecture along the street wasn't obscured.
With this phase of editing complete, I used Silver Efex Pro to lower the midtone exposure and to lower the shadow structure along the roads and central reservation, where I wanted a smoother texture so as not to distract from the rest of the scene. I then used Colour Efex Pro's Tonal Contrast filter to emphasise the highlight and midtone contrast in the light installation, as well as a very small amount of the Dark Contrasts filter, which reduced the glare within the shop windows and the brightness of the Christmas lights, and which also tightened up definition in the darker portions of the image.
The final adjustments were mostly minor changes to the scale, hue and luminance of the light trails, where I tried to settle on a tone that I felt would complete the beautiful scene in front of me. There seemed to be a wonderful distinction this year between the serene spectre of the spirits above and the rush of energy from the traffic beneath, and although I wanted to emphasise the light trails created from the traffic, it was important to me to pare this down so that the viewer's eye would always be drawn back to the light installation. The magic of the Christmas lights is what makes Regent Street a joy to visit and photograph every winter, but their tribute this year to the street's original Christmas decorations added a certain poignance to the scene, and the spirits seemed to perfectly convey the grace and sentiment of the season while they watched over the bustling street below.
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The nearest nature reserve to me during lockdown is Big Waters taking about 90 minutes to walk there.
It sits right beside the flight path for planes arriving (or depending on the wind direction leaving) Newcastle Airport.
In normal years the wintering ducks get so used to the noise they do not move at all when a plane comes over. The enforced silence now of nearly a year means when one does come through they all scatter again.
This Saturday a group of Eurasian Wigeon (Mareca penelope) were feeding right in the corner of the lake near the public footpath. A wary duck species close encounters are not a given but I was able to approach from upwind and behind some reeds to get a good view.
I heard the plane coming and managed to focus on the nearest bird, a male, to catch it as it leapt into the air. Despite the grey day the light was still to capture the shot cleanly.
This really is the second stage but the most spectacular making the trees appear as though decorated with candles.
Banksia integrifolia is a tall shrub or small tree 6 - 16m tall. It is common in sandy coastal areas, but also grows in the forests of tablelands. The light grey bark is hard and rough.
Mature leaves 5 -10 cm long, are stiff, entire (untoothed), dull dark green above and hairy-white underneath. They are generally lanceolate. Younger leaves are irregularly toothed and shorter than the mature leaves. The species name 'integrifolia' means whole-leaved.
The pale yellow flower spikes of Banksia integrifolia range from 7-14cm long and 7cm wide. The bent styles emerge from individual flowers on the spike, straightening and spreading.
A short time after flowering, the seed pods protrude cleanly from the woody cone and open to shed black, papery, winged seeds.
I have been obsessed with soft boiled eggs lately but for the life of me cannot figure out to cleanly peel an egg. I always end up with chunks removed so if you know any secrets, please share! My heart tells me I must study more composition because this feels so awkward but I ended up eating my props before I could try again. I considered removing my Fitbit before shooting but it is part of who I am and have been wearing it for just over 4 years now. So in addition to daily photography, health and exercise are also my passions. What are yours?
Large duck with a sleek body and thin red bill. Breeding males have a dark green head and mostly white body with peachy blush on underparts. Females and immature males have rusty brown head and gray bodies with a cleanly demarcated white throat. Feeds in rivers, lakes, and large ponds by diving to catch fish. Hardy in winter, often staying as far north as open water permits.
Britannia Conservation Area, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. September 2019.
Just warming up the engine before driving away in our frosty winter weather. It was below 0 C but still a pleasant walk for me that day in the sun shine. There is so little pollution in small towns in NZ that wood or coal burning fires are still allowed though many fires burn more cleanly than the one in the background and many use heat pumps.
I parked by the Coastguard Station and excitedly grabbed my camera gear and strided out towards the small stone building on top of the headland hill. What a stunning view as I stood next to St Michaels Chapel looking northwards to Whitsand Bay.
It's been several years since I saw the striking panorama of Rame Head that just blew me away. I longed to attempt my version.
I had the image engrained in my head so ,looking at the chapel and the path then the chapel again and the path, I'm wondering how on earth did this photographer create the image!
The sun was dropping while I had a few practice runs at photos that were going to be merged/stitched together at home. I still wasn't sure whether it was possible to join them cleanly in Photoshop.
So, here's the resulting panorama with the wonderfully warm evening light shining across the sea, along the cliffs and onto the stone-built chapel.
I would like to mention Paul Morgan of Blurredvisionz who had the extraordinary vision and skills to create this composition originally. I continue to be inspired.
The Milky Way rises over a sunflower field during twilight on a recent night.
Young sunflowers follow the sun through the sky each day, turning back east during the night to greet the sun again the next day, but when they mature they stop that and only face east. This makes it a little challenging to find a composition with sunflowers at least somewhat facing the camera when the Milky Way is in the south/southwest, but I liked this angle with the road going by the field, leading toward the Milky Way core, which lined up nicely late in twilight when the sky still had a lot of blue. I really love shooting during twilight because of the blue tones, and of course it makes getting foreground exposures quite a bit easier, especially with flowers that could move with any little hint of wind. And with enough ambient light, I can stop down the lens for greater depth of field without the exposure taking an eternity.
Nikon Z 7 with FTZ lens adapter and Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens @ 14mm and f/2.8 for all shots.
Sky: Star stack of 20 exposures, each at 10 seconds and ISO 3200.
Foreground: Focus stack of two exposures, one at 2 minutes and one at 1 minute, both at f/5.6 and ISO 1600.
This one took quite a while to process, which isn’t unusual for my night landscapes, but I was trying a few new techniques.
When I was out shooting, I made the decision to skip long exposure noise reduction for the foreground shots, which gets rid of most of the hot pixels at the expense of the exposure taking twice as long, since I wanted to move onto the next shot while there was still good ambient light during twilight, and/or capture the Milky Way before it moved too much. I decided I would try editing the raw files in Capture One Pro, instead of Lightroom, for two reasons. First, it has much better hot pixel reduction than Lightroom. Not only does it reduce hot pixels much more effectively as part of its normal raw processing, but it also has a “Single Pixel” slider in the noise reduction panel that you can use to eliminate the more stubborn hot pixels. I had tried it in the past and found it worked amazingly well, so I figured I could skip long exposure noise reduction and just rely on Capture One to get rid of the hot pixels, and it did (your mileage may vary, I didn’t have that many hot pixels to begin with). Second, Capture One allows you to completely disable the built-in lens corrections that are embedded in Nikon Z camera raw files (and the raw files of many other mirrorless cameras from other manufacturers). These built-in lens corrections cause no end of pain in Lightroom on dark images, resulting in banding artifacts that can’t be fixed. Even if you completely disable the lens corrections panel in Lightroom, it will still apply the built-in lens profiles. If you use Lightroom, the only way around this problem is to convert the raw files to DNG and then strip the built-in lens profiles from the DNG files using the exiftool command line tool, and import those DNG files into Lightroom. It’s an annoying although doable workaround, but given that Capture One can also easily get rid of the hot pixels, I went the Capture One route this time. Another way around this with Lightroom is to use a non-OEM lens so that the camera won’t embed a lens correction profile in the raw file.
After doing basic adjustments in Capture One on the two foreground shots, I exported them as TIFF files for focus stacking using Helicon Focus, which often works far better than Photoshop for complex focus stacks, such as a field of flowers.
The sky shots were stacked using a beta version of Starry Landscape Stacker that supports reading raw files, which gets around the Lightroom lens corrections profile issue for the sky shots since Starry Landscape Stacker will ignore the built in profiles.
The biggest pain was getting the sunflower that sticks up into the sky to focus stack cleanly. In the sky image the focus is on the stars of course, so the sunflower is way out of focus and blurred quite a bit beyond the sharp edges of the in focus sunflower in the foreground image. I ended up using a combination of warping and clone-stamping to manually do that part of the focus stacking.
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The Eisbach (German for "ice brook") is a small man-made river, 2 kilometres long, in Munich. It flows through the park known as the Englischer Garten and is a side arm of the Isar River. A manmade wave has been created on one section.
Swimming in the Eisbach is not allowed, but the rule is not enforced, and swimmers can be seen especially on warm summer days. At least two people have drowned in the lower part of the Eisbach, a swimmer in 2003 and a non-swimmer, who may have slipped or fallen asleep near the river, in February 2007.
Just past a bridge near the Haus der Kunst art museum, the river forms a standing wave about 1 metre high, which is a popular river surfing spot. The water is cold and shallow (sometimes only 40 cm deep), making it suitable only for experienced surfers and playboaters (whitewater kayakers). The wave is predominantly used by surfers, and animosities of surfers towards kayakers have occasionally been reported.
The wave has been surfed by river surfers since 1972, and surfing competitions have even been held. Due to the more recent development of playboating, kayakers have only more recently and so far not in great numbers started to surf the wave.
Surfing is now (2010) officially allowed. A new sign next to the wave warns that "Due to the forceful current, the wave is suitable for skilled and experienced surfers only". In previous years there have been issues between the authorities, who threatened to demolish the wave, and a group of wave supporters who organized activities and a website to save the wave, including an online petition to leave the wave intact.
Being a standing wave it can be surfed for as long as one's balance holds, and in busy times a queue of surfers forms on the bank. In the past surfers tied a leash to the bridge to hold onto, but a sign announces that this is both dangerous and forbidden.
The local surfers have forced the wave to break more cleanly, with increased height, by attaching ropes to the bridge which trail submerged planks, creating two large "U"-shapes. Such a shape makes the wave easier to surf for river surfers (playboating makes fewer demands of the wave shape).
A better wave for beginners is in Floßlände near the Thalkirchen U-Bahn station. It has also been surfed since 1972, and it is wide enough to take a few surfers at a time. A third standing wave in Munich forms on the Isar itself near the bridge Wittelsbacherbrücke, but only at flood levels of the river. Due to the dirt, manure and objects like tree branches drifting in the flood in the first days, this wave is usually surfed only a few days after the water level has risen.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1933 Packard 1004 Super Eight 7 Passenger Sedan.
Chassis no. 654-I63
Engine no. 751263
385ci Side-Valve Inline 8-Cylinder Engine
Single Stromberg Carburetor
145bhp at 3,200rpm
3-Speed Manual Transmission
Front and Rear Leaf Spring Suspension
4-Wheel Servo-Assisted Drum Brakes
*Subject of a $250,000 restoration
*2013 AACA Senior First Place winner
*High quality Packard from the peak of the classic era
*CCCA Full Classic™
1933 Packards are wonderfully made and styled automobiles – it was only a shame there were so few who could afford to buy them. 10th series production totaled a meager 4,800 units, a far cry from the 16,613 for the 9th series, and way down from the nearly 55,000 sold in 1929. The 10th series would represent Packard’s smallest output of the Classic era.
Built on the 142-inch wheelbase, the model 1004 was offered with 14 individual body styles. Priced at $3,090 at new, the 7-Passenger Sedan was one of the more expensive body styles available but was still one of the more popular ones for its luxurious practicality. All the same, only 1,327 Super Eight chassis were built, 788 of which were the longer wheel base models.
This specific sedan has been the fortunate recipient of a restoration the likes of which is usually reserved for custom bodied open topped examples. About a quarter of a million dollars was spent turning this Packard into the true jewel it is today. Inside and out, the car is just resplendent. The driver and passengers enjoy soft, fine light tan cloth upholstery and highly polished wood trim throughout. All of the chrome has been carefully prepped and professionally redone. The gauges look as if they have just been installed at the Detroit factory. All of the correct fittings are present and the jump seats in the back look unused.
Outside, the Thistle Green Dark paint is rich and lustrous, the product of meticulous preparation and application that the factory could have only dreamed of in ’33. The chrome is all highly polished as well. A set of Trippe Speedlight graces the front, flanked by a set of auxiliary horns. Above them and astride the fenders are headlights and driving lights from a 1005/6 Packard Twelve. The bumpers front and back are sourced from a ’33 Packard Twelve as well with their recognizable counterweights at the ends. The side mount spares are topped by optional side mirrors too. Opening the hood reveals a cleanly present, highly detailed and correctly finished straight eight motor.
Blackhawk Collection
1092 Eagle Nest Place
Danville, California 94506
Little snail I spotted underneath a fallen tree trunk.
I'm quite happy with the detail and noise rendition of the D7500, it's a clear step up compared to my previous D3300. I would have never been able to shot cleanly in this low light, ISO 6400 condition and get a decent result!
Although it was built in the early 1950s as part of a landmark modernist housing project, Berthold Lubetkin's constructivist staircase inside what is now known as Bevin Court still possesses an incredible space-age quality. Post-war budgetary constraints severely limited the project while Lubetkin was working as part of the architecture practice Tecton, but there's a subtlety and elegance in the final design which give it remarkable impact, and which, besides adding to the location's historical and architectural significance, also make it a surreal scene to photograph.
I visited Bevin Court on a day with mixed weather conditions, when dark clouds seemed to be adding a sinister tone to the shadows inside the building's cylindrical hall, but with occasional bursts of intense sunshine also lighting up the beautiful rich red surface along the underside of the central three-armed staircase. With hindsight, these were the ideal conditions for me to shoot the location in, as my idea for this image from the outset was a muted blue in the shadows that could offset the vibrant warm colour running through the centre of the frame.
Blending multiple exposures via luminosity masking in Photoshop, I used darker exposures to tone down the highlights, and brighter exposures to recover the details along the edge of the walls and in particular along the staircase's balustrade. I then used the Pen Tool to create a selection of the underside to the staircase, as well as the surrounding curved edges of the hall. This allowed me to cleanly blend in and alternate brighter and darker exposures, emphasising the contrast between the parts of the ascending floors that remained hidden in the shadows and the parts where vivid late-afternoon sunlight was falling.
Using the selections I'd created, I was then also able to selectively edit the separate portions of the image. A brighter exposure set to Soft Light was incorporated to bring out the contrast along the underside of the staircase, as well as a hint of magenta via a Colour Balance layer for a slightly moodier shade of red. Next, I applied a combination of Hue/Saturation, Selective Colour and a Gradient Map adjustments to the surrounding parts of the hall for a shade of blue that would complement the dominant red, as well as a soft, pale yellow where the sun was striking the edges of the building's interior. Dipping into Silver Efex Pro and setting the adjustments to Luminosity, I used local control points to amplify the whites and to add further emphasis to the dramatic light that was illuminating portions of the hall, and finally, I used Colour Efex Pro's Pro Contrast and Darken/Lighten Centre filters for a hint of extra definition to the staircase and to add a gentle vignette around the edge of the frame.
The final result plays up the drama and innovation behind the building's design, but hopefully preserves its spirit and character, which were shaped by Lubetkin's ethos that "Nothing is too good for ordinary people."
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