Waterlilies

By shendyNo Comments
While at the gite in France, we took just one day trip (we basically spent two weeks sat in the shade of a large oak tree, reading) - this was to the "Jardin des Nenuphars", Latour-Marliac, at Le Temple sur Lot, a few minutes from Villeneuve-sur-Lot. This is where hardy waterliliy hybrids were first grown and from where Monet bought the lilies for his garden at Giverny. They house the French national collection. A lovely place, really interesting (and with a good cafe), although the greenhouse containing the exotic/large lilies was unbelievably hot and humid - it took me a fair while to recover from just a few minutes in there!...
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Holiday Skies

By shendyNo Comments
Back from a lovely summer holiday in SW France, I've got a few photos to share. First up we have a collection around the theme of "sky" - sunsets, stars and a thunderstorm. Our gite was in the middle of nowhere and was quite high up, so we had a fantastic view of the sky at night - almost a horizon-to-horizon view of the milky way. I want/need a fast aperture wide angle lens as my 50mm f1.4 is nowhere near wide enough to do the sky justice, and my f2.8 24-70 lens isn't really fast enough. Then we have some night-time photos I took at the gite, with the aid of a torch and SWMBO. The third part is sunsets - not so much in the early days because there simply weren't any clouds (!), but some quite good ones later on. We had one thunderstorm - I was woken by lightning just before dawn one day and thundered out to get some photos. All a...
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Abbey House Gardens, Again!

By shendyNo Comments
Last Sunday was the latest of the clothes-optional days at Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury - and perhaps one of the last. Sadly, the owners are getting divorced and the house and garden are up for sale. The remaining clothes-optional days this year are the 17th and 31st August and the 21st September - depending on what happens with any new owner, they could be the last. Not many pics though - I've been so many times that there isn't much new to take any more!...
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Mainly Mousehole

By shendyNo Comments
I've been a bit behind on things - these photos are from a few days we had down in Cornwall in the middle of June. We stayed at the rather lovely Old Coastguard in Mousehole, which is thoroughly recommended. I would advise driving into Mousehole from the Newlyn side as it's a bit hairy coming the other way - steep and narrow! The photos were mainly taken in Mousehole, with a few at the start from the Minack Theatre and a couple at the end from the Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens (a bit disappointing if I'm honest - we should have gone to the Barbara Hepworth museum in St. Ives). We've got all of my usual checkpoints - a bit of black & white and some long exposures. And dolphins! They swam past the hotel when I had my camera with me - never seen any before....
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