Birch Trees.

Not having a Blip for what was today, Saturday, or yesterday, this posting should bring me up to date. Having had a restful morning recovering from yesterday’s exertions, I popped down to the country park to see what I could find. There are a lot of very attractive blue crocuses by the entrance, probably the result of guerrilla gardening, and I spent some time grovelling on the grass getting the knees of my trousers damp. In spite of that, the pictures were not worthy of showing anybody. I did get a rather nice shot of a pair of catkins on the end of a twig before moving on to the birch trees. There is a genre of photography that involves deliberately moving the camera to blur the pictures; a few photographers (but not many) manage to achieve some nice results. I have always firmly believed that it is better to take sharp pictures and then fake it in Photoshop – and that was my plan here. It actually worked quite well, and then I started tinkering. Some masking worked quite well so I tried a different masking technique; they worked quite well together so I moved on to try different ways of blending the different bits. I was pleased with the final result though have to admit that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. As all the competition judges say, you should take pictures for yourself, if others like them, that’s a bonus. I often fell that it would be nice, if just once, a judge liked one of mine.