Walking (once again!) through my beloved Wollaton Park, on a dull, uninspiring day, I was almost slipping into a ‘nothing to see, here’ kind of mood, when I found this leaf on a shrub. I’ve cropped this picture a little, but left plenty of background, so as to show the contrast. For a moment, I had to think which season it was supposed to be – but it was a beautiful scene, none the less. I needed to be reminded that their is so much beauty in nature, all around us, all the time.
That’s just another word for fermentation! Scanning through my Twitter followers, I find lots of people who must surely be very grateful for this wonderful phenomenon.
In this picture, a wine yeast is being ‘started’ with a little warm water and sugar, ready to be added to a batch of mixture to be fermented, which will then quickly burst into rapid fermentation (or zymosis, as you might say.) I forget exactly what, in this case, was about to be fermented – probably fruit of some kind, steeped in water, with sugar added. Each bubble bears witness to the fact that a little bit more sugar has been converted to alcohol. Appropriately, this is accompanied by a beautiful aroma!
Early last week, I spent an afternoon with my uncle and aunt. for part of the time, I took my uncle for a walk, which he always enjoys. And in my beloved Wollaton Park, we found the camellia house was OPEN! This picture is of one of these lovely flowers that we found. There were plenty of white and pink ones, too.
Yesteryear is the bit of history you can remember; when I found this group of buses at an event, last summer, all the styles and shapes were instantly recognisable. Although I didn’t think of it at the time, perhaps the reflections in this picture are symbolic of the memories!
I noticed this young swan in Wollaton Park today. I love the effect of broken reflections such as those in this shot. If you enlarge the picture, you’ll find interesting patterns in the swan’s feathers, too. You can even see a drop a water, falling from its beak – I couldn’t have captured that if I’d tried!
Xanthophylls are a family of natural yellow substances found in nature. The yellow colouring in various types of tagetes (marigold) is a spectacular example. Many leaves contain xanthophyll, which shows up in the autumn, when the amount of chlorophyll present decreases, so that its green colour no longer predominates.
Last week was a very busy one for me, but finally, yesterday, I made time to get some fresh air for a few moments. And once again, I found the joy of just noticing.
This shot is not of a craggy cliff, nor is it an aerial view of a pond (or of anything else.) It’s a close-up view of the bark of a young oak tree. Nature never fails, eh?
Water, in all forms and presentations, has fascinated photographers since the beginning of photography itself. This particular view – on the Northumberland coast – caught my attention as sunset approached. I was in a pensive mood at the time, and the scene just suited me.
