Shadow Bonsai

After my last couple of posts you'd be forgiven for thinking this was another photo which involved heavy editing, but this one is actually pretty close to what my camera saw.

I enjoy shooting using a high contrast black and white setting, though my camera is always set to shoot RAW + jpg, which means that I always have a colour version to go back to when the contrast is too extreme. In this case I liked the way it turned out, so all that was required was a little sharpening.

This is a shadow of one of my bonsai trees on a rather worn cement floor.

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Linking up with Shadow Shot Sunday.

Bonsai

I love photography, but growing bonsai trees is my passion.

Although I've taken the art of bonsai seriously for nearly nine years now, I don't regard myself as an expert. Despite that, in December 2015 I decided to share my bonsai experiences in a blog. Unfortunately things aren't looking too promising at my chosen host, so I decided to move that blog to a Blogspot domain. I've just spent several hours setting up that blog and republishing a few of my early posts.

It's proving to be quite a time-consuming process and I haven't had time to look at any photos that aren't related to bonsai today, so I thought I'd share this image of one of my trees as my photo of the day.

This is a little tree that I started as a cutting about nine years ago, shortly before I joined my club. It's far from being my best tree, but I love it because it's one of the trees that started me on the journey to where I am today. It doesn't look like this right now because I've left it to grow wild in the hope of improving its structure in the future.

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Linking up with Our World Tuesday, NF Tree n Bushes and Tuesday's Treasures.

Palm at Sunset

In the course of trying to get the video I used in my post "The Palm Before the Storm" I made several attempts at time lapse videos, focusing on two different palm trees which are visible from my bedroom window.

On one occasion, when I came to check up on the video I was greeted by this beautiful orange sky and just had time to shoot a couple of photos before the colours faded. Unfortunately the video I shot on that day was not a success.

This is not the tree which appears in the other post.

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Linking up to Orange You Glad It’s Friday and Photo Friday.

Get me out of here!

About a half hour from where I live there's a quaint little shopping centre in an area that isn't quite city but isn't quite country either. In front of the centre there's a busy road, while behind it there is empty land.

Round back there's a section with a few animals. While most of them are in fenced off areas, the chickens have always been allowed to roam around freely. In the past I used to spend a lot of time there and I always found it a nerve-racking experience to watch mother hen walking through the parking lot with her tiny chicks following behind her. I'm still amazed that I never saw any of them get killed by a car.

When they were out of harm's way I loved to watch them and often took photos. Here's one of the mothers with her little ones.

On one occasion I was lucky enough to see something a bit different - one of the hens had climbed up a tree. In this photo she seems to be saying "Get me out of here!"

Don't be misled though, she seems perfectly comfortable in this shot taken only moments later:

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Linking up with The Bird D'Pot, Saturday's Critters, Camera Critters and Saturday Show Off.