in the garden
I sat in the garden, had my camera with me, with the 200mm/f4 Zuiko tele, ready for the bird life, but chance has it that birds do not show themselves when you are ready. They first show up when you have packed up everything. Then I decided on a different game: what can I see from my place, what kinds of objects are present for the observing eye? Well, a tele lens allows for selective photography.
Rhine Blue
Better then Rhine gold, tacky though they are, these glass ‘cristals’ work wonderful in the garden, We got them when the new neighbours cleaned out their garden. Don’t worry, we are not going to ‘do’ pink flamingos, nor pink or rainbow garden gnomes.
Garden hose
Essential: a watering facility. 2022 is already competing with 1976, the dryest year in Netherlands since records have been collected. Three months ago, our grass was more or less a swamp (the Museum in Stad Groningen was about to be flooded again!); we have kept a decent volume of water in the canals and creeks around us (the level is higher than in former years), so farms and gardens are safe, for the moment. But the water will be used by plants and so eventually evaporates. We’ll see.
Crystal ball
Behind the Heavenly Bamboo there is a glass sphere of one of our solar garden lamps. It just struck me as a nice detail, whoch one only sees looking through the lens. Context is important, sometimes not seeing the context gives a better view.
Strijklicht
It was late afternoon, the sun was turning slowly parallel to the wall, creating a wavy pattern by hightlighting the structure of the bricks and creating a shadow with the electricity cable that sits about 1cm above the surface. ‘Strijkklicht’ or ‘grazing light’ — the Dutch ‘strijklicht’, ‘strijk’ = stroke, captures nicely the intimate, tactile and caressing quality of this ligth effect.