Grape Hyacinth

This morning was bright and sunny, and I took Xena for a walk in the woods enjoying the sunshine, And then at about 11am it all disappeared and it has been overcast and chilly all day. This time last week the forecast for this week was for hot and sunny weather, it was even predicting 20C for Friday - well they obviously got that wrong as now the forecast for Friday is 11C, quite a difference! I think we may have a cool and damp spring, much the same as last year - last year it suddenly became a hot and dry summer, so hot that it caused fires and all sorts of problems. One doesn't know what the weather is doing with the affect of climate change, but maybe it will be similar to last year. 

Yesterday I did not have a good day with my hay fever. I took one Piriteze antihistamine pill in the morning and it wiped me out for most of the day, I felt nauseous and so tired all day. I certainly could not have taken one pill every 4 hours as prescribed! So today I went to the pharmacy and they gave me something else, Clarityn which apparently does not cause drowsiness.

These grape hyacinth (or muscari) are ones that Gavin planted in the garden on the weekend. After all his efforts the garden does look better, although the trees we replaced the dead bottle brush trees with look so small there, we had got used to seeing the larger bottle brush trees which had grown so much since we planted them a few years ago.

Last night the mono print competition at my camera club was very interesting. Almost following on from what I was saying about mono images yesterday, the judge started the evening by saying that when judging a mono photo competition, he will firstly determine if the image is better in mono or it should have remained in colour. He said too many photographers convert to mono to rescue an image, or in the case of a mono competition, they take a perfectly good colour image and think 'I had better convert this into mono as I have a competition coming up'. For example one of the entries last night was an excellent image of a hummingbird hovering, the body was pin sharp as it should be while the wings showed the blurry motion - but he marked it down as he said why on earth would you take a most colourful subject like a hummingbird and convert it to mono, it does not improve the original image. Interesting to hear this as I do tend to agree with his thoughts. Our club has a very high standard of photography and the judges always comment on that, he was really torn in choosing a winning image last night and said that he does not usually have such a difficult choice. And no it was not my image, mine was held back but was not placed.

Tonight I have a zoom meeting following on from the workshop I did with Justin Minns in Norfolk in February - Justin offers a post-workshop critique of our photos so we had to send some in and tonight we will be discussing them.