This is all about the textures and patterns created by wind, rain, and waves on the side of a bay in Australia. The rock is a sandy limestone … now as an ex geologist that ought to be a contradiction in terms, you get limestone from deposition of shells and skeletons in very quite conditions with now influx of sand or silt … otherwise you get sandstone with fossils … but Gaia has her whims and in this southern corner of Australia she specialised in sandy limestones. And this creates landscapes on a grand scale (12 apostles … now 7.5, Loch Ard Gorge and more) and on a very small scale in this corner of a bay. As ever, it pays to think and look at the detail sometimes.

And now I am off for a few days in my beloved Cumbria … a few thousand images I feel. See you when I’m back.

Well these two very different images will end my tree theme for now. It has been difficult and though it is good to try and push myself there are few images, perhaps the first in the theme, that I feel happy with. Perhaps a lesson for all; we cannot be good photoimaginators  for every topic. So Mentor&Muse will be pleased that (a) I tried something different and (b) I need to delete some stuff from my hard drive.

The first image is a simple winter trees shot. It was taken on a simple 5mp compact that bI had in my compact as I trudged back from the station having failed to get into work; a few cm of snow and the UK rail system becomes a pile of scrap iron. So the lesson is always carry a camera, and it does not have to be a high spec camera to capture a pretty image. Gaia in the icebox.

And the second is just some tree bark, silver birch to be precise. And again a lesson; sometimes you don’t have to get the whole tree, or the whole anything for that matter; there can be interest and beauty in just a small detail.

Well it is back to work having not felt much like blogging in the aftermath of my cat’s demise. And hard work it is too; struggling with a subject that is really not my greatest forte. Yet that is good sometimes; trying to push outside my comfort zone and learning things in the process. These ar two contrasting images; the one is from dense Australian temperate jungle in New South Wales, the other from a forested area on the English South Downs… I think you can work out which is which. They both were problematical firstly in even attempting to control the contrast between the arboreal shade and the sunlit patches, and secondly in the framing … zoom back to get the feet and tops of the trees yet lose any sense of ‘forest’ or zoom in to get the feeling of crowded competition yet lose tops and bottoms. I have much to learn, yet I need to persist and the exercise of trying to blog this subject is helping to teach me.

The very first post in this blog was of my cat, Humbug. I uploaded the photograph bby accident and the thought ‘well why not’.

I came home on Monday to find her dead. She was 17 years and 3 months old. She had survived being abandoned in a garden shed as a kitten, a very virulent cancer when she was 7 that ‘should’ have killed her within months, diabetes (can you imagine the fun of giving a cat insulin injections twice a day, for several years, and then renal failure for 9 months (the vet gave her 6 months to live); yet finally she died. She was a great cat. As Muse&Mentor put it she really engaged with you. OK it was often complaints about the quality/quantity of food, sardines, water, tickles, strokes, warm laps and soft duvets … but she didn’t just stomp of and sulk, she explained your inadequacies as a servant … she was a cat. She was a great cat. And now she has gone yet the memories remain of her company, her warmth and her conversation.

And she had many adventures, from climbing to the top of a pine tree, complaining about the lack of a ladder to get down (but did it on her own anyway), to being a terror of the wildlife in the garden (as my son put it ‘you knew you were in trouble when she was coming through the cat flap backwards’) and stalking her own tail, which she never really regarded as part of her.

And these photographs (plus unapologetically repeating the original)  are taken with the only dog she would really tolerate and be a friend to, my spaniel Bella, alas also deceased a few years back. And Bella was also called Princess, because she was lovely and acted like one. So Humbug was also known as Duchess … also Little Miss Grumpy Drawers, Buglet and Kitty.

So those who are pet people will understand my sadness; others may think I am a little mad. I care not. It is a happy thing that these little creatures choose to share their lives with us, their companionship, their adventures, their love. Life is sweet.

This is hard work. Having set myself the challenge of doing a tree series I am struggling. I really am at my best with water. But the process teaches me two lessons to share. As an aspiring artist I do have to challenge myself and this series is one of those challenges. And yet as an inveterate hoarder, despite the fact that disk storage is so cheap, just looking at my tree photographs, I do know I have to do a lot of deleting. Whilst, as I have said earlier in this blog, one of the joys of digital is to be able to experiment and take lots of photographs; one of the challenges is in recognising those photographs that neither bring back strong memories of a happy event nor quite make the grade … and delete them.

This image comes from one of the worst holidays I have ever had. It was a walking holiday on the Greek island of Evia in September. OK, we were unlucky with the weather … Greece … September … should be glorious … it poured, and when it didn’t pour it deluged. Yet that was not the major problem … that was the holiday company, JustforYou (naming the guilty) with inept and drunken guides that took us on walks through back yards and rubbish tips and talked of local gossip rather than history and geography, and  a food budget they had cut so meanly so that the money given to the hotels and tavernas with which to feed us  (and it wasn’t a cheap holiday) that, rather than lovely Greek food we were offered such things chicken and chips, fish (dogfish ) and chips and a brown sloppy goop that purported to be moussaka, but wasn’t. The redeeming features were the other walkers, we had much fun and merriment laughing at adversity. Oh and one walk down a steeply wooded gorge was special, It had rained so much that I scarcely dared to get my SLR out of the rucksack; so this shot was taken on a very modest compact at the start of the walk. The rain had let up briefly and the sun was trying to shine through low cloud and mist. It failed eventually but the lighting was atmospheric and beautiful and I hope this image captures something of that day; a very wet Gaia indeed.