Sunday walk - finding joy in the ordinary

I meant to post the last post in my little Stockholm series today, after having missed it last Sunday, but I still haven't got round to editing the photos. So I'm posting some pictures from our walk earlier today instead. We were out for about four hours, just walking around the forest and farmland up the hill. There were no exotic flowers or animals, but instead so much beauty in the ordinary and and all the small things - frogs, insects, cows, wild flowers, leaves, the clouds in the sky. I'm grateful to have such beauty more or less on my doorstep.

A bit of a photo overload today, but that is just nature's plenty.

Sometimes, you miss the perfect shot by a fracture of a second... and capture something delightfully unexpected instead...

Summer has definitely arrived here, the 26 degrees today felt pleasant in the shade, especially with a light breeze, but the hot sun is already burning uncomfortably. I'm not looking forward to the forecasted 33 degrees and not a cloud in the sky for next week. I'm just glad I don't have to sit in the office.

Happy Sunday!

Project 365 | November 2013

Can you believe that it's already the first day of the last month of this year today? Time's just flying this year. November brought a lot of beautiful autumn colours, some spectacular sunrises and sunsets, and the first snow of the season. I took part in a postcard swap, started taking a pottery wheel throwing class, and rediscovered DistressedFX, a photography app, that allows you to add gorgeous textures to your photos - and flocks of bird.

December started with a beautiful day, cold and frosty. Perfect for a walk in the woods. Hopefully, it will bring lots of snow and cold days.

Sunday Walk

I finally managed to force myself to go for a Sunday walk today. It's not that I don't like walking. On the contrary, I love going for walks, especially in the woods (and of course on the beach, but that's not much of an option here). But I just usually end up having too many other things to do instead. Or rather, making different priorities. In order to help me get back into a Sunday walk habit, I made a list of benefits, to give it some purpose, such as looking for inspiration for sketches and paintings, and capture beauty in the ordinary with my camera. I've been neglecting my DSLR camera far too much since I got my iPhone, usually using it mostly for holiday pictures. So today, I decided to use my little 50mm lens instead of my everyday 17-70mm zoom lens, in order to get a different perspective. 

With it's option of an aperture of f/1.8, the 50mm lens allows you  to capture a terrific depth of field, and, according to light, some fabulous bokeh.

I walked along some beautiful flowering meadows. Who would have thought that common little wild flowers can be so fascinating?

And trought the woods. Unlike the woods in England, where many of them are filled with carpets of bluebells at the moment, the woods here are rather bare of flowers, and instead present mainly a lush green.

The weather kept changing from minute to minute, but except a very short little shower, the weather stayed dry, and there was even sunshine as well! It was rather windy, though, which made focusing rather challenging at times.

Some of the rhododendrons (or azaleas, I never really quite know what the difference between them is) in some front gardens where in full bloom and just totally amazing.

And I even found some bluebells in a grassy patch outside a block of flats.

To capture this little fellow, my allround zoom lens, which has quite a good macro function as well, would of course have been perfect. But then that's the challenge; to work with what you've got, and make the best of it. I think he turned out rather well.

What I love about photography is how it allows you to chose how you look at things. Some of the pictures were taken at places that were not exactly the most picturesque. The gras strips between the pavement and the main road, road, on traffic islands etc. But even in those places, beauty can be found, if you care to look for it. And your camera allows you to focus on just that beauty, and to block out there rest. It allows you to capture and elevate the ordinary, to decide for yourself how you want to look at things, what perspective to choose, and on what to put your focus on.

I really enjoyed my little walk, and 'll definitely try to go for a little Sunday walk again next weekend, and make it a regular habit. But I'll better try not to take 220+ photos again - or I'll end up spending all day with downloading and editing them, and won't have any thime for painting, or anything else, at all.

Evening walk

My muse seems to have taken a few days off. I just didn't have any energy at all to pick up a paint brush, or even a pen, these last few days, and when I did, I just got even more frustrated. So I forced myself to go for an evening walk, taking with me my camera, which I had rather neglected for some time now, and my 50mm lens, which I really have neglected for months.

I like to put my camera on the ground to see nature, and with it things, life, from a different perspective.

A walk through the woods always helps to clear the mind and restore some energy. And I even got out my paints and brushes this weekend. Hope the muse has returned from her early spring holiday now!

Delicate winter

I don't seem to find the time to do any painting or even drawing in the evenings this week, so instead I'm posting some more winter pictures. It is, after all, my favourite season of the year, and the delicate of beauty never ceases to fascinate and delight me. 

With all the painting, and drawing, and art journaling, and sketching these past few weeks and months, I have rather neglected photography a bit. Which is a pity, as I really enjoy going out with my camera, and spending some time at the computer processing the pictures afterwards. And it's always worth going for a walk in the (early) morning :).

Winter's beauty

Nature creating the most exquisite art on some car windows. There's nothing like winter :)

Summer...

Summer's now finally arrived here, with much delay, and, in my opinion, rather unnecessarily. I don't like summer very much, and I don't like sunshine very much. Long, cold, dark winter nights, the world outside all white, warm lights inside a comfortable, welcoming home, thick wollen socks, a big mug of hot white cholocate, big snowflakes falling noiselessly down outside my window are much more to my taste. The only thing I really like about summer are the thunder storms. Hopefully, we'll have one tonight!

Textures: Shadowhoues Creations

It's my day off today, outside, the temperature is around 30 degrees, and it's hot and humid, and I'm doing the only reasonable thing - I'm staying inside the house. All day. All weekend. And all of next week I would too, if I could and didn't have to go to work, as summer has apparently decided to hang around for a bit now.

So I'm staying inside the house, spending the time doing things that need to be done, going through my pictures, old winter picures, dreaming of cooler days, longing for winter, snow, ice, the north, another place, another life, listening to my favourite songs, dark, melancholic songs, which bring back memories of times gone by and places where I felt at home.

Maybe I'll go outside a bit later on, when it's cooled down at least a little bit, when the sun has set behind the mountain. But maybe not. I'm looking forward to having the snow scrunching underneath my warm winter boots again, in a few months, hopefully. I feel so much better in thick wollen jumpers and scarfs and winter boots than in t-shirts, skimpy dresses and sandals, and I look much better in them as well, believe me.

Textures: Shadowhouse Creations

So I'm staying in, drinking a glass of cold water with homemade mint syrup, and planning my next summer's holiday: Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, the North Pole... ;)

Enchanted forest

I love a walk through the woods. I don't really like direct sunlight (and should avoid it anyway) and I don't like when it's getting too warm, so walking through the woods really is perfect. You get the shade, the protection from the sun and still all the beautiful sunlight. There's so much to see and hear and discover.

I always like to think that the woods are enchanted, that really, there are all kinds of fairies, gnomes, and other fairy tale creatures populating the forests, and when you walk through them, hundreds of eyes are following you without you ever knowing it, let alone catching a glimpse of any of them.

That might sound a little bit scary now, but I think that they're really quite friendly, at least as long as you let them be. After all, it's their forest, and you're only a guest, passing through.

I could walk through those woods for hours, making up stories about those fairies, and their adventures. The only problem is that the woods around here really are often far too crowded with noisy people...

But there's nothing as relaxing and refreshing as spending some time on your own in the woods, letting your mind wander and your imagination run wild. Watched and protected by hundreds of little eyes...