View allAll Photos Tagged really
It’s really 95 degrees and hotter than heck! So I was wishing form some winter weather. Now just one day no more for right now.
... sorry, but i really love this one....
Shen-Ju Chang and Anna Kiskachi preparing their baroque chamber music concert...
It's really amazing, don't you think?
Landmannalaugar is in the Fjallabak Nature Reserve in the Highlands of Iceland. It is at the edge of Laugahraun lava field, which was formed in an eruption around the year 1477. It is well known for its natural geothermal hot springs and surrounding landscape.
Landmannalaugar is the northern end of the Laugavegur hiking trail and a popular destination for tourist traveling in Iceland.
Iceland. September 2015.
Really love this skin from Ives Beauty @ The Grand. ♡
Skin: Ives - Shelly
Hair: Stealthic - Seduce
Eyes: Avi Glam - Credence
Lip Piercing: Little Fish - Angel
The IMRL really did a great job of putting cars in the ditch for the 5 years of its existence. We ran the hell out of trains and didn't do much maintenance because Washington Corp was just draining the IMRL. Well, the IC&E had a couple of mishaps along the way too. Here they did a number, putting a train on the ground over the top of the Iowa Northern diamond at Plymouth Jct. Now the IANR is back in; we had to detour the trains to Nora Springs and up while we waited to get the diamond back in. Here, the northbound bound for Austin turns the corner onto the Owatonna Sub.
Scanned slide May 2004.
……Not really, just a few leaves laid flat to look like them - an ‘Also-ran’ from yesterdays fill the frame shot where I chose ‘Onions’. Alan:-) HMM..
For the interested I’m growing my Shutterstock catalogue regularly here, now sold 43 images :- www.shutterstock.com/g/Alan+Foster?rid=223484589&utm_...
©Alan Foster.
©Alan Foster. All rights reserved. Do not use without permission.……
Not really a harbour anymore,well not for the last 4-500 years. Rye was one of the Cinque Ports protecting the south east coast of England from invasion. It is now 3 miles inland after the currents formed shingle banks, which are still expanding. Rye Harbour itself is a small village which was formed about two hundred years ago on the shingle banks.
Really pleased to be features in the Scottish Wildlife Trust Video
www.facebook.com/scottishwildlifetrust/videos/31733208627...
really strong sun trying to break through the clouds. That few seconds of being able to see the sun always feels a bit wrong - you know you shouldn't look.
We hadn’t really bargained for a bulging car park here on Christmas Eve. Why wasn’t everyone else charging about in a frenzy, picking up an extra jar of cranberry sauce and having punch ups in the supermarket aisles over the last tray of pigs in blankets? Why weren’t they worrying about whether there were enough crackers or sprouts for the dinner table the next day? I ignored the queue and snuck off to the right into the top car park, which at first seemed to be a bad move until an elderly couple came strolling towards me with intent. “Are you about to leave?” I asked through a wound down window. “Yes, we’re just here,” the man pointed to a parked car five yards behind me. Fortune favours the inventive. Five minutes later, as I walked down through the melee, apologetic volunteers told waiting drivers that the place was full. “We’ll get you in as soon as possible,” I heard a lady say to a bored looking man who was stuck in a growing tailback that threatened to block the road down to the King Harry Ferry. At least I was in, although it was very busy indeed. At her suggestion I’d come here to meet my daughter and two year old granddaughter for a spot of lunch and a slow amble around our local National Trust garden. At least once inside the grounds, things seemed a bit more relaxed. None of us cope well with Christmas. It all goes a bit too crazy as far as we’re concerned. People spending money they can’t afford on things that other people neither need nor want. “Did you keep the receipt?” Ali and I find it all a lot less stressful now that we no longer buy each other presents. One of my cousins is in the Witnesses, and while I don’t share her religious convictions, our views on the festive season don’t seem to be that far apart. Call me Mr Grinch if you like. If you enjoy this time of year, that’s great - all I ask is to be allowed to sit on the sidelines with a note from Matron.
After lunch, when a very small person needed to go home before the danger nap hour arrived, I was determined to grab a bit of time to myself before surrendering to the madness. And this was a place where I’d once come to directly from work, immediately after the end of my last ever autumn term, on an afternoon where I’d seen a couple of possibilities that nobody else appeared to have spotted before. On that drab December day I took shots that promised more than they delivered, and resolved to return with a longer lens and in better conditions. Now, four years and one day later, I was back again. The clock had not long struck two in the afternoon, sunset was a little after four, and Ali had given me a shopping list for Tesco in Truro before six. Which included pigs in blankets. But they had to be nice ones because we were dining with her family the next day. Twelve people in one space with all of those awful Christmas songs bouncing off the walls and rattling between my ears. I refer you to the last few sentences of the first paragraph.
I digress - back to those two compositions I’d seen but never returned to in all this time. The first of them was proving to be rather frustrating. Try as I did, it needed a fast shutter and wasn’t working, so with daylight starting to run out, I moved from the beach and up the slope to the other, where the matching headlands on the east side of the Fal Estuary lay bathed in softly glowing winter light. Last time I tried, it was a tight one to compose with some distractions coming in from the right, but now I had the extra options that the big lens offered, and I was sure this was going to be the time to finally get the shot I’d had in my mind’s eye for so long. With up to four hundred millimetres at my disposal, isolating the twin headlands seemed straightforward enough.
So imagine my surprise when it quickly dawned on me that the distraction wasn’t a distraction at all. That instead of the minimal appeal of a long exposure on the two promontories alone, one with the foreground section on the right might add an element of balance that I hadn’t really considered before. A faster exposure allowed the scene to come alive with the inclusion of the gulls. Of course I tried each option, with exposures both short and long. I liked this one the most. When I think back to this Yuletide season, I won’t linger on parlour games and that tiresome Slade song that I’ve now had to endure for fifty-two (count them!) consecutive Christmases. Instead, this is where you’ll find me - standing alone in a peaceful place, and only faintly worrying about whether the local Tesco will have run out of pigs in blankets or if there are enough sprouts in the fridge for us to make it through to the new year without starving.
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Not really, this is a crop, he was farther than he looked, it was with a 400mm and a 2.0 converter that gave me 800mm's. :)
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Mallard Drake
Scientific name: Anas platyrhynchos
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🔎 Enlarge for best viewing 🔍
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Stormy Sunrise Over Sunburst Park
I have to admit...I really didn't feel like getting out of my tent two weeks ago when the alarm went off at 4:30 AM. It had snowed a bit more overnight and everything seemed to be covered in ice. But I pulled out the jet boil, made some coffee, and staggered out into the cloudy predawn light. The Nublet might have only been 4 or 5 kilometers from the Magog Lake campground, but it might as well have been on the moon. I forgot to take my 14-24 out of my bag and between the weight of my tripod, new ballhead and multiple lenses, it was like hauling a couple of boat anchors up that trail. I grimaced several times as young twenty-somethings bounced happily up the trail past me as I sat shoving snow in my face to make up for the frozen life straw in my pack.
Somehow I made it back onto my feet and just managed to make it somewhere between the Niblet and the Nublet (I never did figure out which was which) just as the sun broke through, lighting up the clouds and bits of the range in front of us with a brief burst of orange. Suddenly I quite forgot about the fact that I was exhausted and freezing my butt off and spent the next two hours shooting some of the most gorgeous real estate in the Canadian Rockies. For someone like me, whose batting average was now in the minus territory after striking out with 10 days of shooting in the Northwest last Summer, 10 days of shooting the Dolomites last Fall, and finding the entire Western Hemisphere covered in smoke on my 10 day trip through the Canadian Rockies a month ago...this view literally brought tears to my eyes. Every once in a long while, I actually come across a breaking storm with some decent light. As the lady who set up her tripod next to me exclaimed "Thank you God!"
There was indeed much to be thankful for over those 10 days of shooting in the Canadian Rockies. When my shooting buddy Eric and I first arrived, the forecast was grim. Five days of gray skies...right through our time in Assiniboine. It was beginning to look like we might not see the sun at all. Instead, we were treated to just about everything from 4 inches of new snow, to bright sunshine, to some very decent sunrises and sunsets. The larches were just hitting peak color and we seemed to have arrived during a very small window this year between Autumn and Winter. A couple of days after we arrived home, almost a foot of new snow fell in and around Banff, and a second storm dumped even more later that week.
All of this to say, there will be many more images to come. We both had a fantastic time in the Canadian Rockies and we can't wait to go back. Our travels took us from Banff into Assiniboine for 3 nights before heading North to Jasper and Robson, finishing with trips to Yoho and back to Banff. As I told Eric, I paid for this trip in spades when I got back home and had mountains of work to catch up on…but that trip was easily worth what we paid in cash, time, energy and blood. More photos to come!
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I have no idea when the last passenger train of any sort may have crossed the Maumee on the former DT&I but this last weekend's "Ohio Rail Experience" trip provided some rare miles to riders. With the CRR 800 on one end and a NKP Geep on the other I couldn't resist shooting it and top of the list was the Maumee River bridge which is undoubtedly the scenic highlight of their trip from Leipsic to Diann and back. 10/12/19
Really, the snow is not to blame; snow in early April is pretty normal here. No, I'm afraid the daffodils jumped the gun a bit!
My house is built on hallowed ground and land that was reclaimed from the sea. It suits the essence of me and calms my spirit to walk in my garden knowing that it was left for many years, an abandoned place until the house was built and the stony and sandy ground where nothing much grew except ancient plants; wild flowers that blew in on the wind. Then someone planted trees from all four corners of the earth and plants that should not have survived began to flourish as if the roots of these trees breathed new life into the earth. There have been only a few guardians of this magical place and I am honoured to be the current guardian. At first I tried to plant what I liked; tried to enforce my will on this holy place, but in time I realised something … you cannot force a garden to grow; to bend to your will. A garden evolves slowly over time of it's own accord mostly and we, as guardians, should allow it to guide us. In this way I have found peace and happiness here and I embrace the changes of my ever-evolving garden. I seldom buy anything new to plant. I wait for the winds; I wait for the seasons; I witness the changes and I grow and evolve as a person in much the same way as my garden does. It is a joy to anticipate each new season; each new wind; and to see what appears. There is always something unexpected appearing. Life is full of surprises; of serendipitous moments. I wonder sometimes about these old trees. I think whoever planted them was guided and perhaps the garden welcomed the dappled shade on what once was a desert. Certainly I feel myself sometimes directed to introduce a new species. Perhaps I am guided also by a hand that I cannot fathom. We are not meant to understand everything. If we allow ourselves to just be, we may find, without effort, how our path unfolds with relative ease. I have found this to be the case. All those years of struggle and now I can just let go … it really is that easy to be content.
p.s. I was compelled reluctantly to remove a Laburnum tree that I thought might be harmful to my cats. I had always wanted such a tree with it's beautiful yellow flowers … but in it's place a Forsythia grew with a profusion of yellow flowers. I did not plant it! Magic? Yes, I believe so! : 0)
“I like gardening. It’s a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself. “
– Alice Sebold
Soundtrack : www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbx6aXhocew
IN ABANDONED PLACES - Raison d'Etre
Please enjoy the unique experience of this video.
Lieber Rolf, ich denke du wirst diesen Film zu schätzen wissen! : 0)
“We leave our footprints in a place to mingle with the echoes of all that went before; our heartbeats; our rhythm; the patterns of our lives.” - AP
I wander in the wilderness
my garden of delights
a jungle by the turquoise sea
a land so flat; the moon at night
shines down with silvery fingers
and touches the ground with magical spells
and come the breaking dawn of morning
all ills are banished and all is well
the dark and mysterious creatures
who loiter in the dusk
emerge in brilliant sunshine
with all-seeing eyes; an elephant tusk
protrudes and scythes the longest grasses
parts the meadow like the ancient sea
leaving behind a trail of crimson
flowers of sorrel and sweet harmony
reigns here as the King of the Jungle
seeks solace in the afternoon siesta
ignores the urban sounds outside
these walls; these trees; a back-firing Fiesta
alerts the songbirds from their idle rest
they flitter and flutter from tree to tree
and as I lie within the striped hammock
I swing and sing low to the sound of the breeze
a mist arises suddenly; springs up from the sea
settles a cloak; an air of mystery
around the shoulders of myself and the limbs
of the ancient trees as I sip my Pimms
I can barely keep my eyes from closing
the warmth of the air so cloying and deep
I find myself falling gently to the humming of bees
as I lapse now into a soundless sleep
I awake to find the blue sky black
lit by a billion diamonds or more
an infinite guide is laid out before me
the wisdom of ancient celestial stars of yore
some say when we see them
they have already died
long ago before our ancestors
what does this imply
do our eyes deceive us
or are we psychic or perhaps
we are more knowledgeable than we realise
all we need falls easily into our laps
but still we often ignore
the instincts that are given
override them; divide them
dilute them; we're driven
to only see clearly to the end of our noses
we fail to stop often to smell the scent of the roses
take stock; stand still
absorb the nature of all living things
for in this garden I discovered
nature brings happiness and happiness brings
peace of mind; plentiful bounty
the sweetest fruits of the earth
the love that will bind us
circumnavigate the world's girth
here I find every day all that I need
the flora; the fauna; all that set seed
and I've no desire to be anywhere else
as much as I desire to be here
in this garden full of Heaven
there is love; there is goodness that I hold dear
from the humblest of creatures
find the beauty in a fly
sing so loud like a blackbird
view the world through a child's eyes.
- AP - Copyright © remains with and is the intellectual property of the author
Copyright © protected image please do not reproduce without permission
My artwork is a blend of 4 of my photographs taken in my garden
We don't really have parks this nice. Not anywhere near me, at least. Reveling in the glorious feeling of walking *down* a long flight of stairs (after the previous photograph), we made our way over to Choi Wing Road Park.
At the very edge of the park, surrounded by tall blocks of flats stood this little tiny tower. It's a fantastic building, offering up stairs and lifts to help people move up to the higher level of the park. It's an example of 'form follows function' and I'd say its slightly industrial feel really works in the setting. Nice.
Something you miss by not being there when this was taken: I was pretty much standing in the doorway of the Men's toilets to take this. Where will I find myself next?!
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Hong Kong! Again! After the first time not working out so well (mostly due to my condition) me and my best friend Michael returned to do the bits we missed out on and generally have a few different experiences than before.
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Really enjoying the bluebirds. They must still be trying to decide which box to nest in as they go back and forth.
HDR image.
National Trust property.
I really enjoyed my visit here.
28 3 16
Little Moreton Hall, also known as Old Moreton Hall, is a moated half-timbered manor house in Cheshire, England.[The earliest parts of the house were built for the prosperous Cheshire landowner William Moreton in about 1504–08, and the remainder was constructed in stages by successive generations of the family until about 1610. The building is highly irregular, with three asymmetrical ranges forming a small, rectangular cobbled courtyard. A National Trust guidebook describes Little Moreton Hall as being "lifted straight from a fairy story, a gingerbread house".] The house's top-heavy appearance, "like a stranded Noah's Ark", is due to the Long Gallery that runs the length of the south range's upper floor.
The house remained in the possession of the Moreton family for almost 450 years, until ownership was transferred to the National Trust in 1938. Little Moreton Hall and its sandstone bridge across the moat are recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building, and the ground on which Little Moreton Hall stands is protected as a Scheduled Monument.] The house has been fully restored and is open to the public .
At its greatest extent, in the mid-16th century, the Little Moreton Hall estate occupied an area of 1,360 acres (550 ha) and contained a cornmill, orchards, gardens, and an iron bloomery with water-powered hammers. The gardens lay abandoned until their 20th-century re-creation. As there were no surviving records of the layout of the original knot garden it was replanted according to a pattern published in the 17th century.
not really, just two phones.
when I was young we had one phone on a party line. which meant, to you young ones, that several people were able to use the same line. my parents didn't want to pay for a private line.
a lotta people, but very short phone numbers.
and heavy phones.
second photo in comments.
Large Format 4x5 Crown Graphic Special
Ilford MG FB warm toned paper
shot at f/4.7 for 30 seconds
home developed in eco pro for 2 minutes
I really didn't do alot with the C30-7s on the BN/BNSF. I got a few here and there on the Aurora Sub once the MACs started knocking them off the coal trains. Weird to see them on hotshot intermodal trains after years of heavy lifting coal trains. They looked great painted whiteface! On lead what looks like train #7 as they working into East Dubuque back in 1997.
Scanned slide from June 1997.