Photo Challenge – Page 94

Backlight

The new January Squares challenge, hosted as ever by Becky, the Queen of Squares, is all about ____light. In this often dull month light of any kind is what we all need to lift our spirits as we wait impatiently for spring to begin. Click on the link to find out more.

Backlighting A prunus serrula (Tibetan Cherry)

A magnificent small garden tree for year round interest its most prominent feature is its tactile, silky, polished bark. The smooth, mahogany bark peels in translucent cinnamon and honey coloured sheets to reveal a fresh new hue of bronze-red gloss beneath. Caught in autumn sunlight this tree almost glows.

Common Name: Tibetan cherry tree, birch bark cherry, birchbark cherry, paperbark cherry

backlight (verb) = illuminate from behind.

January Squares | Day Three

Alight

Kookaburra Alights on a fence post

Palm Beach (where the Aussie soap Home and Away is filmed) December 2014. When this kookaburra landed practically in front of me as I was walking up to the Barrenjoey Head Lighthouse it seemed as though it was begging me to take its photo.

Kookaburras are terrestrial tree kingfishers of the genus Dacelo native to Australia and New Guinea, which grow to between 28–42 cm in length and weigh around 300 g. The name is a loanword from Wiradjuri guuguubarra, onomatopoeic of its call. Wikipedia

alight (verb) = (of a bird) descend from the air and settle

January Squares | Day Two

Sunlight

sunlight on alice on a winter’s day

I wanted to begin the month with a scene all too familar to me as I look out of my bedroom window. The green pastures of Trink Hill where the Trink Dairy Holstein Friesians and Herefords graze providing some of the creamiest milk you can find. On a typical winter afternoon with dark clouds moving in from the west, sunlight appears and lights up the Cornish scene all too briefly.

Alice is a disused engine house

sunlight (noun) = light from the sun

January Squares | Day One

October Squares Review

Becky (the Queen of Squares) challenged us to find lines in October. In Squares naturally. Any lines.

“Your lines can be long, short, straight or curvy. They might be horizontal, vertical, diagonal, perpendicular or even zig zag. You might prefer them intersecting, natural, singular or in stripes.”

lines

Line 1: Floor in Sydney’s Customs House Library; Telegraph poles along the dunes in Phillack/Hayle; Bird cage art installation, Sydney; Haymaking field and cabbage lines in Godrevy.

Line 2: A stripy cat; Office building in Sydney; Infinity Blue sculpture at the Eden Project in Cornwall; Bicycle railings at Godrevy.

Line 3: Herring-bone paved walkway in Auckland’s harbour area; A line of beach huts at Herne Bay, Kent; Fencing on Godrevy; Groynes and a disconnected pier at Herne Bay.

Line 4: Countryside lines in South Devon; DNA lines on the Globe installation, San Diego; Roof lines of the British Museum in London; Fishing lines on the pier in Herne Bay.

Line 1: Electricity power lines along the dunes in Phillack/Hayle; Lines of words (dictionary) from an art installation at the Customs House Library in Sydney; A Widow’s Walk in West Bay, Dorset; Zig-zag flooring in the Queen Victoria Building (the QVB) in Sydney.

Line 2: Multiple reflectons of the Sydney Opera House; lines of poetry created by me using the Erasure technique; waves on the River Hayle (Heyl); Solarised effect on banana leaves.

Line 3: Tramlines on Auckland’s quay; Shadow and paving at West Bay, Dorset with some cryptic words; the train line from London to Portsmouth on a very snowy day in 2010 when all the trains stopped running; another globe featuring the decline of the polar bear habitat.

Line 4: Lines of Longitude and Latitude encouraging the use of tall grass to help with climate change; lines drawn in the sand by the RNLI coastguards at Gwithian sands in Cornwall; wavy pavement designs (calçada portuguesa) typically found in Portuguese towns and cities – this one in Cascais; V-line formation of Brent Geese heading to their roost after feeding on the Hayle estuary.

Many thanks to Becky for hosting this lovely challenge. Her followers have increased this month due to the wide ranging nature of the concept of lines. Once you start looking around you you realise that you are surrounded by lines. Man-made and natural. Literal or metaphorical. This is a theme that could last an eternity. If you have missed any of the wonderful entries then you could allow yourself a few hours to browse the clever selections that Becky creates during the challenge which is an immense task and for which I thank her.

Oh, and does anyone know which of my ‘lines’ in the collages is the bonus one?

October Squares | Day Thirty-One

This is the last in the month that Becky (the Queen of Squares) has challenged us to find lines. In Squares naturally. I’m finishing with several poignant lines that I hope you will like.

Visiting time

October Squares | Day 31

Many thanks Becky for hosting yet another wonderful and inspiring challenge: you always get me to see the world around me differently. A review of this month’s squares will appear in a couple of days – meanwhile I hope you have a well deserved rest!

The words in this poem have been selected using a technique known as Erasure. I’ll let Cathy (~wander.essence~) explain it.

This type of Found Poem is known as Erasure, where you choose a source and erase away most of the “text” and leave words and/or phrases and/or sentences so that what’s left says something very different from what the original writing said and is art. The end result should be something different from what the original text said.

Mine came from a page in a novel I was recently reading and I just thought I’d give it a go. The end result is not so different than the original text, but these words caught my imagination. I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to form your own story.

~wander.essence~ poetry