The networked veins of a dried leaf
Tag: nature Page 2 of 3
Phoneography Monday Challenge: Nature
hosted by Lens and Pens by Sally
App used: Camera+
Post-processing done on my PC.
I was taking a picture to show you my favourite weed/flower. But the dog kept nosing under the bushes.
Identify yourself!
So I had to stop and check what’s up with her. And then I found this pair of eyes staring back at us.
Perhaps it’s mean to say this but it’s always funny to see the cats go all “red alert” when there’s a dog near :P
No cats were hurt in this photo shoot. I petted street cats regularly in my teens, but it changed when I got a dog. LOL.
We were scheduled to meet with some small dogs for the first time.
And because we had a not so successful introduction to another dog before, and knowing that Donna can sometimes be overly friendly and want to approach some dogs we walk pass on our walks. And also that she has, admittedly, a past history of antagonistic relationships with other female dogs – namely her mother, siblings, a former cell-mate called Grace – I thought it prudent to take the dog for a long walk in the morning… 2 hours. :P *pats self on the back*
Aside: Doggerel recently published a post on that gives the key points how to introduce unfamiliar dogs, if you are interested.
We went to the pretty Bishan Park. (I have more pictures and a related news article on my previous post on this link to dog urban agility at Bishan park, if you are interested.)
One of the lovely features in the park is the man-made stream that runs through the length of it. At various points of the stream, there are stone steps that one can traverse across to get to the other side for the fun of it. We’ve never tried going across them before, but there’s always a first for anything isn’t it?
So I thought hey, Donna can parkour across the stream by hopping across the stone steps!
But first, the coast has got to be clear, so we waited for this man to come across. I thought to take a picture of Donna before she starts her journey across the stream, but she didn’t want to stay. She wanted to forge ahead.
When I was a child, my dream was to go to university. If you think about it, it would make sense, wouldn’t it? After a few years of working, I longed for a job closer to nature (out of the office) and wondered how one could become a landscape architect. My friend laughed and said it must be the hay fever speaking. It was too late. As adults, we have too many other worries. A few years ago, I met a lady travelling in Canada. She must have been a number of years older than me and she was a landscape architect; it was a mid-career change. I have often wondered, if mid-career changes are just easier to engineer in another country other than Singapore.
Flowers in the Sky
I found a mirror in my iPhone,
an app that worked magic.
It made a scrap of nature symmetrical,
look unnatural, less organic.
Weekly Phoneography: Nature [challenge details here]
Apps used: Gorillacam, Camera360, Snapseed, Camera+
App effects: There is a mix of filtered and unfiltered photos here.
I played with this,
creating arrangements that decorate.
A virtual landscaping tool;
it does not propagate.
Foreshadow
For every bloom that unfurls in the sky,
every leaf that uncurls unseen by man,
every cell resounding the cry of nature:
every beginning foreshadows every end.
Every blossom drying out,
every petal a recital
of every falling back to the earth,
an unending cycle.
Close up
And so in the best way they know how
each photographer’s eye will capture,
the essence of life, no different from
the tiniest purveyor of nectar.
Nature
And if the weed goes unseen
It will not matter,
Nature’s serendipity gets discovered,
sooner or later.
Though often overshadowed
by sculptural bits of plant matter
nurtured by human design
to impress and to flatter.
P/S: I thought it was time for a bit of bad poetry to pop out :P
We visited the Gardens by the Bay in the late afternoon. Very lucky because there was a very short stretch of time where the plants were bathed in dancing light. I have always loved the interplay between light and shadow, though I am too lazy to go out of my way to capture it. :P
I have never liked the bougainvillea. It is a very common roadside plant, often in its many gaudy colours. Deep bright fuchsia horrors. I was never fond of fuchsia. And because it is by the roadside, it is inevitably dusty and tattered, sometimes dry and twiggy.
But see it in a different light, pink veins lining the delicate paper-like petals. These I quite admire.
I even wrote bad poetry for it, titled “Bougainvillae”
Had to power up my dusty OmmWriter to find the haiku within! :P Donna had one for Ku too! You should go see it on Ku’s blog at Haiku by Ku! ;)
Somehow the image of an woodcutter chopping up a tree and yelling “timber!” as the tree fell is ingrained in my memory, even if there is no woodcutting culture or industry here. Hah! That’s the power of the media for you.
Anyway, the tree cutting has started. Here’s the guy who will take the tree apart, limb by limb.
Phoneography Monday Challenge: Nature – I seem to be making a habit to take pictures of man and/vs nature nowadays.
Apps: GorillaCam, Snapseed, Camera+ (Cyanotype and Toy Camera filters)
S7F5XFJMWQHA
It is sunny here all year round and the town council maintenance guy didn’t get to this tree soon enough.
The fall of leaves
Walking the dog has made me notice more the outdoor environment around me. In general the weather here is hot and wet but there wasn’t any rain in the last couple of weeks, and when it finally poured some areas in Jurong experienced hailstones… in the tropics! Go figure~
On one of those random days, I was just hanging around downstairs waiting for Mr P to come by and pick me up in his car. I had just discovered iPhoneography Monday then. So I was trigger happy and adding junk shots to my camera roll.
This is a skinny young tree right by the foot path from our block of flats. You can barely see the bark behind the green stuff growing on it.
Not unlike my dog, I wrapped myself around the tree and tap, tap, tap… and before I knew it, I was at the back of the tree and this was clinging quietly right there. To tell the truth, I almost missed it because it blended with the tree so well.
I do confess my timid heart and this was as close as I dared to go for macro. :P Yes, even if I do believe it was quite dead. Mr P said otherwise and intimated that it will jump on me at any time.
And yes, I took liberties to add mysterious purple and deep green wounds to the tree to show you the potential or imaginary poison contagion left by the spider.
And then on my way home today, I found a section of the railing removed from the fencing running along the path. If I had a toy train, I would slip it inside and pretend it was a city rail tunnel.
Yup these are my close up shots for Phoneography Monday: Macro
Apps used: Camera+, HDR Art, Blendcam, Snapseed, InstaMag, HelloCamera
There’s a rainbow in the sky! Out came the iPhones and it was not just mine.
There is always something very compelling about the sky that makes me fill up the majority of the shot with it. The sky is the sky and yet it is so changeable. At times mild, at times dangerous. The sky is all wild nature, albeit sometimes tainted by man-made smog.
The strange thing about nature phoneography, at least for me, is how I am so tempted to make nature to be so much more than what it really is in real life.
The rainbow doesn’t look obvious enough. Let’s use the vibrant filter in camera+, let’s up the contrast in Snapseed, etc etc. And yet, I wanted the clouds to retain their soft colours and fluffy nature. So yes, I did continue to edit using Photoshop so that the editing was more specific to certain areas of the image only when it came to the clouds.
Quite some time back, I was awestruck by how the cross-winds sent the raindrops aflutter at more than twenty storeys high. Usually one sees the rain streak down in obvious pinstripes according to the direction of the prevailing wind. But that day, the rain drops flew like confetti in the air in all sorts of directions. Their frenzied activity caught in the light and I was mesmerised. What happen in nature in motion does not translate very well when one is using one’s phone to point and shoot.
That light-hearted flutter of tiny drops in the light gets lost. And so I try to achieve a sharper image with the clarity filter in Camera+, up the contrast, applied a gentle emo filter so that the tiny droplets show up against the darkened colours. It is of course a futile exercise.
What one ends up with… kind of like a stylised, sharp image of a moody scene peppered by dandruff for rain. I like it though. It looks like a town where Batman may visit :P
And then I wonder, what if I had taken my camera camera, not my handphone camera, and set it to achieve a longer exposure. Would that have captured the flying rain? Do I even know what I am talking about? :P
But still at least one image within this entry I would like, to be simple, basic, unedited and still interesting. And so, this is the one I have for you. The anvil-shaped cumulo nimbus in its gentle luminescent glory.
Which appeals to you more? Nature untouched or Nature made hyper-real?
Phoneography Monday: Nature
App used: Gorillacam, Camera+, Snapseed
