My Flora and Fauna Friday post this week is the Common Bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) a bulbous perennial plant.
Found in Atlantic areas from north western Spain to the British Isles. The plant is associated with ancient woodland and is regarded as a sign of spring. This display of Bluebells was photographed on a woodland section of Bickerton Hill in southern Cheshire, England.
This is my contribution to Debbie’s One Word Sunday prompt Vertiginous.
I had a couple of ideas for the prompt before remembering this photo. Taken approximately 30 years ago, I’m looking over a sandstone escarpment down on the Cheshire plain below. The slope is so steep it used to form the defensive edge of an Iron Age hill fort.
This is my contribution to Tina’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: From Forgettable to Favourite prompt.
Initially I struggled to come up with an idea for this challenge. I ended up scrolling through some of the folders of photos on this tablet looking for inspiration. At that point I quickly came up with a couple of photos showing before and after.
The full frame, unedited version of the European Robin standing on my 600mm lens. The camera isn’t square or centred in the frame and has tape on it. There’s also a light band running at an angle across the top of the frame.
The edited version. I squared and centred the camera, cropped the top of the frame and took a little off the bottom. I then converted the camera to monochrome to hide the tape as much as possible. I have been using a variety of edited versions of this image as my online avatar for years.
An old post box in a sandstone wall at Bickerton Hill in southern Cheshire, England. A film shot from the mid 1980s. I have scanned the original with two different scanners and copied the slide with two different cameras. All the digital versions have a strange colour balance. If I get the grass and red post box looking right the sandstone and sky look wrong.
A selective colour treatment converting the image to monochrome while leaving the post box red.
This is my contribution to Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge: January Colour – Pink prompt.
Throwback Thursday travels back to southern Cheshire in the early 1990s.
An early snowfall while lots of the trees still had their leaves. With the weather conditions I headed to Bickerton Hill in southern Cheshire for some photos.
I must have been standing on the edge of the sandstone ridge to get this photo looking down into the shallow valley below.
This is my contribution to the One Word Sunday prompt History.
You may wonder how a frozen puddle on a sandstone outcrop dropping down to a shallow valley is historical.
The sandstone outcrop is on the edge of a steep hill that forms part of the Sandstone Trail on Bickerton Hill in southern Cheshire, England.
This steep hillside formed the northern and western edge of an Iron Age hill fort known as Maiden Castle. I am standing where someone would have been living centuries before the Roman invasion.
This week my Flora and Fauna Friday post is the Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), a large deciduous tree.
Alternative common English names include conker, buckeye and horse-chestnut.
The species is native to the Balkans in South East Europe. However it is widely cultivated throughout the temperate world.
This photo was taken at Bickerton Hill in southern Cheshire, England and shows the seeds, seed capsules and leaves in the autumn.
