AstraZeneca Archives

2021 May

lines and circles — Playing with crystal orbs and marbles!

Spring is still an uncertain quantity as May begins. May 6th saw the elections to Holyrood – and the now familiar hail and gales were in evidence everywhere, with several inches of snow in the Highlands. Despite months of mud-slinging by opposition parties, and the late disruption of Alex Salmond creating a new party, the SNP led by Nicola Sturgeon emerged triumphant for a 4th term. There were huge sighs of relief, and not just here!!

As the weather remains so variable we have remained indoors a whole lot more than usual. And I have started a series of shoots of my assorted crystal balls, larger orbs and marbles. From the tiniest crystal or marble to tennis ball size and even larger, they all have their magic to weave!
The page header is a small crystal orb on a silk scarf, giving a vibrant pattern of lines and colours, reflected and refracted in the clear glass.

crystal in the sunshine — Catching the early morning sunshine

And here the same crystal was set in the window to catch the low early morning sun. With all the refracted light and inverted image of the window, the garden beyond and the sky – it is both simple and complex … and quite magical!

A decoration from Christmas – and one of my favourite photo props!

This time it was plastic, not glass or crystal – a favourite decoration that never gets put away with the rest of the Christmas things! It is one of my photo props that always delivers!

And May has a special significance for me, as May 12th is the birthday of Florence Nightingale. No – not for the current pandemic and all the magnificent efforts being made by nurses worldwide – but because we now think that in later life she suffered from what we now call M.E. or Post Viral Syndrome (PVS).

blue hydrangeas — Blue hydrangeas for ME/PVS day on May 12th.

PVS is what changed my life back in the 1980s. It is full of resonance now, as Long Covid is just the latest version of Post Viral Syndrome! It is undoubtedly a truly vicious virus, but there are so many similarities to previous viral attacks and their aftermath – I do hope that the medical people trying to deal with Long Covid will realise the link and draw on our experiences to help their search for ways to handle post viral events both past and present!
I’ve written about ME and Me on Inedita.

And talking of Inedita itself – it has been 3 years since we began to build this site! Time does fly!! And I decided it was time to design us a new site image.

the first site graphic — Our first site graphic for Inedita!

Our first one expressed how new we were to WordPress as our means of building (well re-building) The Liddells website. Previously I had used Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage 2003. But times changed, and I needed a new platform. We’d both been writing many articles, and hosting them on a friend’s website but we wanted to collect the material together, as well as writing more personal sections, such as this Journal!
So I set about finding a new image that would combine Mike’s literary strands with my photographic ones ……

the new site graphic — And our new site graphic for Inedita

So I took the theme of Seigfried Sassoon, who’s poetry Mike has written about extensively in Sassoon Agonistes and combined a WW1 image with a photograph of my own, taken with the Lensbaby an optical system I’ve written about on Inedita too. Merging and blending images is something I enjoy, using photographs, and sometimes blending a photo with a watercolour image. There’s an album of some of the blends I’ve done on Flickr here.

And so May ends with my collage of shots and images I posted to Flickr this month.

collage for May 2021 — My Flickr collage of all the shots I uploaded in May 2021

And on to June, and welcome summer with the Delta variant?
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Flickr holds Elisa’s online Photo Gallery
© 2021 Elisa Liddell

2021 April

plum blossom — The Japanese plum tree is usually a mass of pink by now – but winter is still with us!

April is the cruellest month! How right T S Eliot was!
Winter continues unabated – sub zero nights and cold days have dominated April 2021. The plum blossom is almost completely killed on the Japanese flowering plum tree by the gate. Usually the tree turns into a pink delight in April, but this year there are just a few random pink dabs among the bare branches! The new green buds on the hydrangeas and azaleas are blackened and blighted too. It is indeed cruel! There is more hail than snow, and the high winds sweeping down from the Arctic are driving the hail off the large field behind the house, and into our garden, building up against the house, and into our faces when we open the back door!

winter in April — The garden is full of the snow and hailstones blown off the field behind the house!

By the middle of the month the snow has been replaced by overnight frosts and bright sunny days. Better than the constant snow and hail, but the weather pattern is still so very cold, even at midday. The blue skies are very welcome, and the sun is hot through the window glass – but it is deceptive! And there is now no rainfall at all – so the land that has been soaked all autumn and frozen solid all winter is now too dry for the Spring planting to germinate properly.

winter sunset in Spring — It looks more like midwinter than April!

On the personal front we have managed to continue to do some of our own grocery shopping. The lockdown together with the vaccine roll-out has seen a welcome and reassuring fall in infection rates, hospitalisations and deaths. There is now a Covid Dashboard provided by PH Scotland that shows cases by Local Government areas, and within each area too. So we can check to see how safe the places we wish to visit are.
It is a strange world when the freedom to enter a shop and choose my own fruit and vegetables is a real treat! What used to be a regular chore has become a mark of returning normality, and real delight to look forward to!

April 14th – and another milestone. We both get our second vaccination jag!
That is only 8 weeks since the first, and we were expecting to wait another month. So now we only need to wait another 3 weeks to ensure the antibodies have built up fully. Early May will be so good!
No ill effects from the 2nd AZ shot – a mild ‘flu’ feeling for a day, but not even a sore arm!

April 26th – and there is a lot of easing of restrictions, both for travel, meeting others, and for opening up of shops, cafes and pubs. The emphasis is on outdoor meetings and venues as these first tentative steps test how effective the lock-down and vaccine roll-out have been.

But most of these changes are not affecting us two, as cold winter weather continues to make indoors most appealing! So I have been enjoying shooting anything and everything that I can find lying around in my studio! Catching the fleeting moments of sunshine, and celebrating the feeling that the year of constant stress might be loosening its grip…

feather and hydrangea — Feather and hydrangea, one of my many ‘odds and sods’ shots.

I call this slightly frivolous excursion into random still-life shots my Flickr Odds and Sods album, and am happily adding to it as often as I can!

tiny medicine bottles — Some of my tiny antique medicine bottles – as a monochrome

feather and stone — Feather and stone, one of my many ‘odds and sods’ shots.

And before April ended we managed another trip to Fyvie Castle and grounds, to see if the new green of Spring had finally managed to emerge. This time I took a Sony NEX-7 with the magical Zeiss Makro E 50mm F2.8 lens. Usually used for close macro photography, I have discovered it is a wonderful landscape lens too!

Spring at Fyvie loch — Spring is finally showing the first signs of new fresh green!

To round off April with the photography I’ve posted on Flickr, here is the collage of my online month.

collage of shots for April 2021 — The collage of shots taken and uploaded for April 2021

April ends the way it began, with driving hail and freezing temperatures.

And on to May, and has Spring arrived .. at long last?
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Flickr holds Elisa’s online Photo Gallery
© 2021 Elisa Liddell

2021 March

winter road shot — The bleakness of winter still remains in March!

March began with the first vaccination accomplished, and a wait for the second dose that may reach into May. It developed into a month of unholy wrangling with the EU over vaccine supply. Over half of the UK adult population have received a first dose, and the impact has been striking. Numbers in hospital with COVID, in the ICU, and dying from COVID have all fallen dramatically since December when the vaccination began. Studies are showing that the gamble of maximizing the range of the first jab and delaying the second jab has paid off.

The EU has been slow to give medical approval for the vaccines, and also slow to place orders for them. They have an average of 10% of their populations vaccinated, and are facing a third wave, with lock-downs. The immediate outlook is bleak for people in Europe, as the variant becoming dominant is the B117 (Kent variant) that has plagued the UK too. It has proved to be more tranmissible, and more deadly than the original virus here.
Sadly the EU Commission response has been to try to block vaccines produced on the continent from being exported to the UK. They have spent two months trashing the reputation of the AstraZenenca vaccine, and are now trying to ‘sell’ it to their populations! Currently there are significant numbers who are refusing the AZ vaccine, despite growing research evidence of its efficacy and safety. What a mess!!

Here we both had the AZ vaccine, and after a couple of days feeling like a mild dose of ‘flu we have had no adverse effects. The Shingles vaccine was much worse!! So now we feel more confident going out and about. Still in lock-down in Scotland in March, so exercising at Fyvie Castle and essential shopping in Inverurie are the extent of our ‘out and about’. But there is a slight feeling of returning normality, as we are no longer totally dependent on deliveries for our weekly grocery needs!

Infrared of Fyvie loch — Winter still rules! Infrared at Fyvie loch

The weather has been against us, as sub-zero temperatures (especially overnight) have made for bleak, cold and windy outings for exercise. The trees have been battered by the severe winter and are not at all photogenic , and only snowdrops are adorning the pathways at Fyvie

snowdrops at Fyvie Castle — Snowdrops make for a magical white carpet at Fyvive Castle.

With a little Helios lens magic the snowdrops appear to swirl, and add a little magic! Indeed magic is needed to see the beauty hidden in the wintry corners of the castle grounds….

Lensbaby snowdrops and fence — Last years leaves and this years snowdrops caught with the Lensbaby.

This time it is the Lensbaby optic adding some colour and sparkle to the cold day!

So much of my time has been spent indoors – too cold to think about tackling the garden and all the dead-heading and clear-up after the winter!
Decision time! I am still determined to fit my watercolour adventure into the already cramped timetable for the day/week/month! It does take my energy reserves right to the edge, and it does mean the housework is being neglected!
The more I dig into my first watercolour venture (some 20+ years ago), the more I understand when artists say watercolour is the most difficult and challenging medium of all! I have a whole lot to learn or re-learn, and yet I know where I want to go ….. so balancing the need to learn important things with wishing to avoid a “watercolours by numbers” approach is making for slow progress! I don’t want to lose my own vision …. The first thing that I need to get a grasp on is the colours that I have got.

I want to use as many transparent colours as possible, as they can let the paper glow through – but there are so many qualities to each paint. Transparent, semi-transparent and opaque is only one quality to weigh! There are staining/non-staining colours, and then reflective colours, and sedimentary colours … and then how about warm and cool colours, colour dominance? …. and I am nowhere near the paper choices, or the brush choices!

I have decided to simply throw myself in the deep end, and sink or swim. The problem is that I am not good at failing … especially not repeatedly! I tend to beat myself up, and get discouraged…. so I am trying to fit a small watercolour ‘corner’ into each day … failing, but gradually getting closer to every other day! So I have ‘built’ my first palette.

My starting palette — My first palette selection, with transparency in mind.

I’ve already been experimenting with mixing my painting with my photographs ….

Eggs blending photo and watercolour — Daily sketch eggshells and blend with photo

See more on the August 2020 page, and on Flickr I have an album of all kinds of blending and merging of media. I want to use some of the landscape images I’ve captured over the years, and express them in watercolour too … like this winter sunrise as we drove along ..

freezing fog on the road — Ice and fog, a dangerous but magical mixture.

So, as March draws to a close, and the sunny days begin to outnumber the wintry ones, my ToDo lists are packed with ideas for photography and painting, and my online Flickr presence will vie with the demands of house and garden! Hopefully there will be the chance to travel to the coast, as lock-down restrctions ease. It may be May before we see a second vaccination jab … so extreme caution is still the 2021 ‘normal’. Here are the images that I posted on Flickr during March ….

The collage of shots taken and uploaded for March 2021

And on to April – has Spring arrived .. at last?
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