f.Light Photography

This is my last week in autumn, as we are leaving soon for the southern hemisphere where we will be landing in the middle, or maybe closer to the beginning stages of summer. It will be quite a change, getting used to the heat again, after slowly moving into winter. Although, lately it’s been getting cold, wet and miserable pretty fast. One day it was summer and lovely warm weather and the next it was dark by 5 and rainy, muddy and cold. Autumn certainly throws some arbitrary weather at us, doesn’t it?

But, and this has to be said, autumn is certainly one of the loveliest, most photogenic seasons. I know I’ve said it before, but no other season inspires me as much as autumn to go out and take photos, to revel in the beauty of a leaf or to crawl on hands and knees to get that shot of a tiny mushroom. Sometimes I feel quite self-conscious when I’ve been on a photo-walk or morning run where I’ve taken my camera along, when I return with stains on my pants and my hair all over the place. But I like the photos, so in the end I guess it’s all worth it. Even the occasional scratches from some branch that got in the way.

This last week the weather was very temperamental, but there were some sunny spells, and I’m glad I took advantage of them. I used my Sigma 18-200mm lens, and although I had to get used to having zoom again (after only using my 50mm prime lens the last couple of weeks) it worked quite well. The results? Well, see for yourself. Some more tiny wonders from God’s perfect nature!

The last picture is an HDR I created from 3 bracketed shots. I’ve loved that tree ever since the first time I saw it in its autumn colours, maybe also because it stands a little on its own. I just had to capture it and because the light was quite low (it being very early in the morning), I decided to go for HDR, as this gives me the opportunity of getting a little more detail than an ordinary shot would have provided me with. I think from all my photos of that day it’ll remain one of my favourites, simply because the tree is special to me, and because when I walked up the hill, I got to see the sunrise and two cute bunnies running across my path. How is that not a lovely way to start the day?

This week I am extremely early with my 52-week-project photo, as my topic forced me to do it now, rather than later in the week. We are moving and thus need to pack all the stuff we wish to keep into boxes which will be shipped home. This is quite an undertaking as we have collected quite a few things. And as the boxes will have to be packed by the end of today, this is the only time I still have an empty box available for my purpose.

This week I wanted to take a photo which deals with the move and all the packing which we have to do, so I put myself in a box and this is the result. I sometimes wish I could just crawl in a box somewhere and forget about everything. Moving is really not my favourite activity. I wish I could just stay put somewhere and forget about ever having to put stuff in boxes again. Although…in a way it is good to be forced to take inventory every now and then and to get rid of all the things that clutter up our lives. So, here’s to packing, moving and cleaning out the clutter!

I just had to post a picture of my awesome brownies that I baked last night. They turned out so wonderful and I was quite impressed. After failing miserably with baking muffins in the past weeks, I decided to turn my hand to brownies, and after finding a great recipe from Jamie Oliver for brilliant brownies I made a batch. Apparently the proof is in the pudding, and in this case this photo:

We spent the day today visiting an old school friend of my husband in a small town in England. It was beautiful taking a walk through the countryside along the canal. Obviously all I was doing was running around taking photos of everything I could find, while the others had to wait every few steps when something took my fancy. Here are my best results, amongst them their cute cat. Hopefully one day we can also have a pet of our own. I might go a bit crazy then and have a whole album dedicated to that as yet unknown pet. But I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.