K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge…

It’s a roasting hot bank holiday Monday, just for a change, so this week’s prompt for K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge couldn’t be more appropriate.

K’lee set the prompt for today’s challenge and it was as follows;

”  ‘The Quest For Fire’. There it is. You can translate, create, or otherwise consider anything you want as it pertains to FIRE for this challenge…you can use barbecues, fireworks, or other sources of fire (responsibly!) in your um, ‘quest’ to enter this challenge. It’s completely up to you. “

I thought that, after last week’s close up experiment, I’d stay with small and modest and try to photograph the birth of a flame, so to speak.

There are a few attempts at capturing the point of ignition…

…followed by this composite image, complete with flaming thumbs.

NOW CLICK HERE TO SEE K’LEE’S PHOTO.

So, fire up your imagination and show us what you’ve got.

To get involved with the challenge, post a photo to your blog, add a pingback to this post (or to K’lee’s) and don’t forget to tag your post #CosPhoChal.
Alternatively, add a link to your blog in the comments of either mine or K’lee’s post and we’ll come and check out your entry.

Any and all effects, editing, Photoshop, Instagram, morphing, collages or whatever other post production techniques you fancy are permitted, (in fact, they’re actively encouraged!) so get creative and turn your photos into artworks for the Cosmic Photo Challenge.

#CosPhoChal

 

K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge…

Hello and welcome to a new week, it’s time to get up close and personal for today’s Cosmic Photo Challenge.

On Friday, I left you a prompt which asked for close ups of whatever you fancied shooting; whether that meant photographing miniscule insects, doing an intimate portrait study of your own face, or zooming into the microscopic world of cells and crystals, making tiny stuff bigger is essentially what we’re after here.

I chose to go with a couple of interesting rocks from Audrey’s selection of gemstones, fossils and geological curiosities that she has collected or been given over the last few years.
I thought I’d post both the full sized and close up versions of the two specimens, along with this first shot of the pair of them inside a 5″ frog mussel shell, to give you an idea of scale.

First the stone with rock crystals growing on it…

…and here’s the more detailed, slightly enhanced view;

Followed by the lump of iron pyrite…

…and a close up of the strange, alien landscape formations on the surface;

GO HERE to see K’lee’s submission for the week.

So, what did you come up with this week?

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To get involved with the challenge, post a photo to your blog, add a pingback to this post (or to K’lee’s) and don’t forget to tag your post #CosPhoChal.
Alternatively, add a link to your blog in the comments of either mine or K’lee’s post and we’ll come and check out your entry.

Any and all effects, editing, Photoshop, Instagram, morphing, collages or whatever other post production techniques you fancy are permitted, (in fact, they’re actively encouraged!) so get creative and turn your photos into artworks for the Cosmic Photo Challenge.

#CosPhoChal

 

K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge…

Welcome to Monday and the first themed post in K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge, the photography feature that positively encourages you to muck about artistically with your pictures, to create something more than just a photo.

The prompt from K’lee, posted on Friday, was for Beaches;

“Beaches here in San Francisco almost always mean COLD water; cool-looking, but cold…..I’m shooting for tropics, warm, sun; beaches that remind you of summer (it’s right around the bend…)”

Well, since I’m in England and it’s a Bank Holiday weekend, (traditionally a guarantee of dreadful weather) the chances of getting a nice sunny shot of any beach scene are nonexistent today, so I’ve worked on a photo from around the same time last year.

This was taken at Woolacombe, on the North Devon coast and I love the coppery reflection of the light on the sand, which I’ve accentuated slightly by adding a faux HDR effect and tweaking up the contrast and reducing the brightness a little, (to overcome the glare of shooting into the sun) giving a nice warm glow to the finished shot.
I also like the way the aeroplane’s vapour trail bisects the sun.

You can see K’lee’s entry for this week’s challenge HERE.

So, let’s see what you have to offer; post a photo on your blog, tag it #CosPhoChal and pingback here or leave a link in the comments.

Go on, get creative…

#CosPhoChal

 

#atozchallenge: U is for Undulation…

U is a bit of a problematic letter, there aren’t too many ways can think of to crowbar it into a post for the A-Z challenge, so I’m going to cheat.

I really like the words “undulating” and “undulation”, they are just nice, satisfying words to say. I also like the motion which they describe; “one of a series of wavelike bends, curves, or elevations”, which can be applied to the curvaceous shape of something, too.

So here are a few photos, picked from shots that I’ve taken over the years, that feature undulations of one sort or another; whether it’s in landscapes, hills, clouds, treelines, or one of my more peculiar architectural compositions…

#atozchallenge

 

K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge…

It’s Monday, so it must be Cosmic Photo Challenge day.

Last week we had our first outside contribution to the feature (from Linda G Hill) and I’m hoping that as time goes on, more of you will feel the urge to share your creative photographic experiments with us, but for now, let’s get to today’s offering.

If you’ve been following this new thread at all, you’ll already be aware that, while K’lee has tended to go with enhancing his beautiful pictures with subtle yet striking filters and editing techniques, I often lean towards abstract and surreal compositions, which are as far from the original image as I can get.

Today is no different, as I have transformed this photo of a shrub in our garden (pieris japonica, for all you horticulture vultures)…

…into this gloriously colourful, organic kaleidoscope pattern:

Now hop over to check out K’lee’s entry in this week’s challenge and, if you want to take part, leave a link to your post in the comments and don’t forget to tag your post.

#CosPhoChal

 

Send in the clouds…

Third post of the day, to mark my 500 post milestone and to entice you over to Photo Sans Frontiers, my beautiful photography blog.
I’m giving you this post as a reblog from there, but please click over, just for a moment, and hit that follow button.
Thanks.

Photo Sans Frontiers

It’s been an amazing day for clouds, here in North Devon, so much so that I had to stop off on the way to and from work and capture the beginning and end of one of the sky’s best days (photography-wise) of the year so far.

I’m always being told I’m not supposed to shoot straight into the sun, but I don’t hold with any of that…

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Arboretum of the imagination: Meetings with impossible trees…

Here’s a little experiment to complement my post on imaginary architecture, this time applied to the sculptural beauty of trees…

Photo Sans Frontiers

Meetings with Remarkable Trees, by Thomas Pakenham, is a fabulous book and it’s where I stole the idea for the name of this post.

Other than that, there’s no connection, except for the trees, obviously…

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