Brightness

After all those drab rainy pictures, it's back to chirpy flowers! Although for how much longer, I can't say. I'm afraid my large backlog of photos is already starting to run low after only a month or two of blogging... eek. Hopefully this will provide the impetus required to go out and take lots more lovely pictures and not the impetus require to go "ah well, nevermind" and completely abandon this blog. That would be sad. But it's definitely trickier to enjoy photography in the winter. For one thing, the light's not as good; the flowers have all disappeared and (horror of horrors) sometimes it's pretty damp and chilly to be standing around taking forty pictures of the same tree to get it just right. And I refuse to post pictures which I don't actually like!

So I guess I better take advantage of whatever sunshine sees fit to grace our shores this September, and get snapping...

Incidentally in Ghana I noticed that they use the word "snap" in the same way we use the word "photo"; a photo is a snap, while to take a photo is to snap. I thought it was a cute usage of the word (although briefly confusing when people ask if you want to snap them...)

Stripes

I'm still annoyed at myself for having sliced off the edges of the petals in this picture. I was in a hurry, we were just about to leave the garden when I suddenly saw these flowers and they really struck me. The combination of very vibrant, unusual colours with a rather standard and unexciting shape is refreshing.

Raspberry Ripple Flower, and a Fact of the Day

The pattern of these petals is stunning and reminds me of an interesting thing, which I hereby present to you as my Fact Of The Day: some flowers have markings on their petals which we can't see, because they reflect UV light that our eyes don't pick up. Certain pollinating insects can see into different spectral bands than humans, and the flowers' colouring reflects this; sometimes what appears to us as a fairy unexciting bloom looks quite different if you use a camera which is able to record ultra violet or infra red light. There's a really nice website here which has photos of different flowers shown as they normally appear to us, and coloured to show the UV patterns and fluorescence which we can't see. Some of my favourite examples include this picture, which I think is featured in Richard Dawkins' book The Greatest Show On Earth, this very jazzy example, and this rather dramatic bloom, which clearly shows the "bulls-eye" pattern that a lot of UV-patterned flowers exhibit.
So next time you see a rather plain and insipid bouquet, just remember: perhaps it's your eyes and not the flowers which are at fault...

Oddlings & Ends says: Hello, World!

Hello, world!

I suspect this blog will largely be a means of justifying my obsession with photographing flowers and occassional pretty things. Henceforth, when I am standing in a garden taking pictures of the same poppy for ten straight minutes, when everyone else is already longing to seek out the tea room, I will be able to grandly announce: "It's for my blog, you know!"

And everyone will be impressed.