a scarecrow

(shurely, it's in the wrong story?)

well, I had my orders!

...and I knew she was right. Anne said I must get my finger out and take more pictures. Now I know I should take more pictures! I should make more mistakes...

So, yesterday I was shocked to find two bald tyres and today I drove over to Kwik-Fit to address the situation. When the guy said it would be half an hour to get around to my car, followed by twenty minutes work I thought ''brilliant!''.

''That'll do for me'', I left him the keys and went for a wander...

Watermoor isn't a part of the town I get to see much on foot, it's the other side of town. Virgin territory for me and the camera; mainly old residential properties, fast food takeaways, auto repairs and st. michael's recreation ground. I suppose it was a bit of a challenge but I had a go...


Lyons' corner.

the colourful escape.

grime, rust, algae and...random daubs of blue paint?

checker plate

escape

brick work.

the odd discolouration was effective in enhancing the texture of the wall. I refrained from tweaking it myself, hoping it would work on its own. In these times of tweak it's difficult to know what's tweak and what's not. ah well...

pussy knocker.

when I opened a flickr account, a very nice chap invited me to post a knocker to his interest group - flickr has loads of different interest groups! The way it came about was I'd been wandering about the garden desperate for inspiration and took to snapping our own lion headed knocker - which rarely gets used as we encourage visitors to come straight in the kitchen. Consequently, our knocker is covered in spider webs! I put it on flickr just to get my numbers up!

I never gave knockers a second thought up until that invitation - now I'm often looking at people's doors to see what kind they have. One day, I fear my collar will be felt for suspicious behaviour!

eyeless.

okay, it's a shutter, the eye part of the hook and eye is on the roof somewhere.

the flaming bush.

Almost expecting to find moses hanging around... I've no idea what these shrubs are called - or if the yellow one is the same family as the red - but the park gardener at St. Michael's should be congratulated on a neat bit of winter planting.

holy trinity: beyond this point.

Ixus has four settings: normal colour, colour enhance, sepia and monochrome. I only use normal. If I like a B&W shot I decolorize - way down - rather than greyscale. I prefer that slight, almost imperceptible tint. (I have no idea why I'm in an explanatory mood today.)

prohibition.

such hard times in a one horse town.

Head

sunday shopping couple.

These two passed by while I was composing the Head shot - so I snapped 'em!

amputee

Saw this on the way into town (no pun intended) and just had to stop off on the way home to snap it. One of the things I can't do on ixus satisfactory is good depth of field control so paintshop to the rescue! The background was a little too distracting, drawing the eye away from the subject, so I've drawn around it with the selection tool and muted it with a low level gaussian blur.

That, in UK, is what we sometimes call an anorak moment. :D