March is so often the grey and bleak tail-end of winter. As the snow comes and goes, the slush and rain take over. And here the farmers begin to plough fields ready for Spring sowing. The trees are still bare, and the colours all so drab!
So our long winter continues. This is the 6th month when it has been so cold we need the central heating on 24/7. It is truly a bleak and brutal winter. I’ve been looking for both warmth and colour through the lenses of my camera. And I’ve chosen glass and prisms set against a bright orange scarf to offer a warm alternative to the outside world!
After so many years we have ‘discovered’ Turriff park and lake!
Although it is still colourless and cold there, I took my Lensbaby (the ‘original’ I started with in 2013) and added some lensbaby fly-away effects to the winter lake.
Looking across the howe from our garden, and using a telephoto lens to catch the sun brightening the world and revealing the winter white that still dominates our lives!
Most mornings start with scraping ice off the cars, spreading grit and salt on the slippery paths, feeding the birds as well as we can, and keeping the ice off their water dishes.
Then curling up and keeping warm indoors, wrapped up in quilts and sipping hot drinks.
With our world still dominated by winter the garden is low on photographic interest. Here dried flower heads from our blue ‘mop-head’ hydrangeas are caught as the sun melted the ice on the petals (using my oldest Helios lens)
A real snow storm in early March, caught this time with the Zeiss Makro 50mm lens. Again the dried flower heads of the hydrangea – looking so different in the background bokeh!
I move as many planters as possible indoors to overwinter – many of them my delicate pink geraniums.
And they occasionally reward me with a fresh and delicate flower to cheer the indoor world, and provide me with a lovely subject to shoot! Here with one of my newest miniature Japanese vases.
And being confined to the warm indoor world, I search through my ever growing store of photo props to celebrate each new day! I bought a large collection of marbles on eBay one year. Always a delight to shoot.
I decided to concentrate on my internal world this month, rather than the external and political events that continue to swirl around us. Together with books and music my photography forms the bedrock of my creative life. We have each other – which is the absolutely essential bedrock on which everything else is built. And we have been so lucky to be able to support each other through the long (and ongoing) pandemic experience. We do feel the impact, especially in energy terms – the stresses are always leaking energy. I suspect we are all on the edge of exhaustion as we contemplate the coming months!
And so on to April, and I turn my mind to more technical matters!
Back to the 2023 Cover Page
Back to Notebooks cover
Flickr holds Elisa’s online Photo Gallery
© 2023 Elisa Liddell