Today's commission

The morning was spent at home and I finally managed to get the last of the bedding plants in. The slugs have eaten most of the petunias I put in a fortnight ago and I don't want to put pellets down in case that harms our hedgehog.........hmm.

This afternoon I took Mum to the U3A to hear about Red Kites. In fact we saw an amateur video about red kites which told us very little indeed. Then there was a video about a young pilot who died in bad weather whilst training for WWII. I hate to be unkind, but it was very boring, especially the long sequences of people drinking tea at a village hall do and other lingering shots of a man holding a tiny bit of fuselage found with a metal detector. Oh dear.

Mum wants a picture of the poppies in the rape field behind our house so that she can paint it. I had the idea of using a long exposure to create a blurry effect in the camera but I could not find the Lee filter holder anywhere. So what you have instead is an image taken using a long lens and very shallow DOF. Nice when enlarged. (Later I found the filter holder - phew - that would have been an expensive loss.)

The best bit of the day was watching the Trevor Nunn documentary about The Tempest. Very well done and thought provoking. Good old BBC4.