~ A head full of notions ~

As a fully paid up and proud member of the working class, I get to enjoy a certain number of leave days every year. This week I have had 5 of them. Next week I will have 5 more......

At this early stage I'm not sure who I will be or what I will do when it's over......but there's nothing surer than I will return with a head full of notions. Plans and schemes for how to get fit, ideas for new photographic projects or art that I will create. How I am going to change my life, leave my job and probably even move house. I will have set out new areas of the wild garden, begun a painting renovation job or two, and decided that we will have to extend the house. 

The end of the holidays will eventually creep up on me.......and lo and behold I will simply go back to work. It's not guaranteed that the notions will turn in to projects, but that never matters, it's the process of day dreaming that has been restored by summertime, space and a clean sheet......

Hope you get a few summer days at the seaside too......and a little more time to dream......

What is, is....

I could see from the window that the Purple Loosestrife was blooming profusely in the bog field. Every day as I ran out the door to complete my week's work I held the image in my heart and waited for the opportunity. (Am not too bad at delayed gratification after all these years of practice) At last this morning I headed out after breakfast with the camera.

It was about 9AM and already too hot to bear. I stood for a long time under a Sycamore tree watching and waiting. The scent of the creamy Meadowsweet was intoxicating. The shade welcome and eventually I sat on my rucksack and succumbed to the silence.

Every most fabulous insect, danced in my face, but evaded my lens!

My photos were supposed to be of Butterflies, Dragonflies, Damselflies, but they just flitted and floated by. Every precious moment of their beauty and presence even more fleeting and impossible to capture than usual. 

Instead I got tangled up in a evil briar. (Loud cursing!!) Why do the beautiful moments slip by impossible to hold onto while the clawing, gnawing of thorns is impossible to escape? Beauty is brief and frail, pain deep and unending......and so on, muttering to myself while the briar clung to me like a desperate man.....

Later on the beach while the country sweated in an uncanny 30 degrees, the superficial lacerations on my legs soaked in the salty sea water and I suffered a little less. When I came home and looked at the pictures I saw again a gentle reminder of the beauty of photography, capturing moments in time now gone. What is, is. 

And so I label these pictures,"Purple Loosestrife on fire in the bog in the July heatwave of 2013". It may be an invasive species in some countries but here kept in check by Irish beetles, it is stunning without doubt, purple which is always good in my book, and like the elusive butterfly, soon to be gone except here between ourselves, on our mutual internet cloud of colour.....

Also posted on Vision and Verb today

Also take a peek at my new project here www.onehalfshuteye.blogspot.com

Blogging facts, 10 lessons and a few seeds.....

Foxglove Lane Facts

Friends this is my 200th published post and there are another 157 that are still in draft. I have been blogging for 28 months and have uploaded almost 1,000 photos here. Foxglove Lane has had over 261,000 pageviews. As I started out with one very short post and one tiny photo, today feels like I have come some distance along the creative path.......So here we go, the top ten blogging lessons learned to date.....

 10 lessons 

1. Dawn and dusk

Modern digital cameras are incredible. While studying in college, the costs of developing and printing was enormous, the chemicals in the dark room brought me out in a rash, black and white was where it began and ended. So imagine the liberation of re-discovering photography in an era of total creative control!! Nevertheless the light of both dawn and dusk are still my top photography tip, that at least hasn't changed!

2. Make the space

So far my top blogging highlight has been developing a creative space of my own. Up to now I have been craving a "room of one's own" as described by Virgina Woolfe.........but my space has turned out to be a virtual one. Just a few paces from the field to the cloud.....That's it, just me, a camera, a few lenses, a tangle of cables, a laptop and wifi!

3. Small is beautiful

The down side of blogging is the pain I get in my neck from typing and drooling over other blogs. I work on a very small laptop.....I love the compact nature of it, the mobility, the scope. I often wonder if I should have a bigger screen? But to be honest it is important for me to limit screen work and maximise the "actual" work so I continue to squint and hunch with the benefit of less is more.

4. Just do it

The upside is you get better at all of this. One of the biggest thrills for me recently was that I learned a bit of CSS code to change small things on my blog and galleries. Improvements happen through practice and doing what I do. There are amazing blogs out there (I will compile a list of my faves one of these days) but keeping to a personal learning path, blogging about daily reality, photographing the light and shade, showing up every week, these have been the most important underlying facts of blogging.

5. Stepping back

The biggest disappointment is not being able to keep up with replying to every comment every day. I thought I could! As the work grew, the day job exploded, and the lessons required more time, I had to step back and focus on delivering rather than socialising! I miss it but I simply don't have enough hours in the day. (I still try though)

6. Don't be shy, be ethical

Most important lesson was to set out anonymously, otherwise I would never have broken through my shyness. Initially a combination of blogging and a twitter stream helped me to connect with the world and the encouragement of other bloggers especially the Irish ones sustained me over that first year. Although I eventually signed my work, I also learned how to maintain privacy, boundaries and continue to aim for an ethical approach to both photography and writing. 

7. Make encouraging friends

What's heartening is that people who read, comment and contact me seem like wise old friends at this stage. Encouragement was what I needed......a million thanks to each one of you who saw that, I think you know how much it still means.....  

8. Love it

Craziest part? I am still loving this!

9. Don't listen to the voices

Advice? Don't listen to the voices in your head, they are easily distracted by the brilliance of others and need to get 100% focussed on getting down to work!

10. Content 

Out of 200 posts these have had the most pageviews. I'm never sure why some posts are more popular but I think the harder I work at the content the more the world seems to appreciate it.....

10 Popular posts

1.  Love

2.  Always an Apprentice
3. Frosty morning on the lake
4. The beauty of the web
5. A mysterious relationship
6. Is creativity about just putting one foot in front of the other?
7.  "You wouldn't get the likes of it in Killarney"
8. The courage to be happy
9. Relentlessly snowy Berlin
10. A blanket of green moss soothes the brain

A few seeds......

To celebrate I have a fledgling project to share with you today. If Foxglove Lane is the Studio then one half shut eye is the sketch book you might find there.... lying open at a random page. A space to explore inner and outer worlds, to play with the dreamy colours of digital image making, to practice capturing people and places. It will be a comment free zone but please feel free to browse or if you would like regular updates just sign into the "follow by email" gadget.....

Summer Bay

If Ireland is green then Australia must be blue. It's Autumn but the sun is bright and the air is as balmy as one of our best summer days.

She left Ireland 30 years ago to go and live down under. She described her choice as the only option left to an Irish girl, still unmarried and without a good excuse to leave home. The plan was to advance her career, the result was a lifetime here.  There is a long story, about a very long journey, but it's hers.

She's one of my oldest friends. We shared the ups and downs of all the teenage years. You don't ever forget this kind of bonding, it's just a given that it's always going to be there.

She stands on the beach staring into this incredible Australian blue. Now I see her with fresh eyes. Making that epic journey to a new continent on the other side of the world. Leaving everything familiar far behind in time. It was a very long way from home on a quiet suburban street in the cosseted southside of Dublin. She has always had courage.

Only one other of our classmates has made it out here to visit her, and that was many years ago. We are not drawn here like the next generation. What must it be like to live so far away from Ireland for your whole life? 

I can see how much she loves her chosen home. I keep saying to her that I "get" Australia having visited here. It is so beautiful, easy going, idyllic.

Next month I will attend the wedding of a young friend also on an Australian adventure. There's a new generation of women making similar journeys to find their own groove in the world. If I had my life over again? Yes I would go in a flash, but something else has kept me here and that is another story.....


PS  Dear friends next week will be my 200th blogpost so I'm planning something special........if I don't get totally distracted by the heatwave that is!

PPs And yes most of these photos were actually taken in that "Summer Bay"of tea-time soap fame.....

Summer morning in an Irish country garden

The morning begins with 6 ducks swimming right to left in the lake at the end of the field.  Then shortly afterwards 8 ducks swim back in the other direction.  I am on pause. At 5 in the morning, after weeks of travelling and seeking I am slumped in a chair in front of the familiar view.

A pair of larks flit across the gorse at the side of the hill. A blackbird stands alert under the willows. The golden reeds facing east, usually subdued by shade are lit up by the rising sun. The house is quiet and I pad around looking for wifi. My plan is to download another New Yorker author reading a chosen short story and return to the leaba.

The sunny morning seeps in and instead I reach for the camera. It's still cool but the sun is up now, and the wind so far is being kept at bay. The wild garden, tamed by ground cover this year is allowing the flowering plants more room to breathe. And so am I this sunny morning, breathing, slowing and settling.

Last year more photographs were taken by us humans than all the photographs EVER taken in all the years before that.  We are all now part of an enormous visual community capturing our everyday lives digitally. And so here is my everyday stuff. Not much stirs here, but if it flutters or flies, I will be there soaking in the intensity of my Irish country garden. 




See more photos in the Summer Wild Garden Gallery here