I’ve started running in the mornings. It’s great, in lots of ways – quiet, convenient, smugness factor – but it is really surprisingly hard to run before breakfast. The 3-mile route that doesn’t usually stretch me much is totally beyond me in the mornings, and I’ve only just worked up to 2.5, slow and shuffling and red in the face.
The snail was waiting on a leaf just after my finish line, having clearly got there first. I’m trying not to take it personally.
Bath Street, where all the cool offices live.
City foxes aren’t even shy any more.
There’s a garden a few houses down from us that’s a Prime Development Opportunity, which means that it’s abandoned until someone works out how to afford to build the totally underground house that’s the only thing that could get planning permission in that space. Because ‘it would be impossible to return to the usage the Victorians had envisaged for it’, even though that use was as a garden and it seems to be doing fine at that at the moment. Aaaanyway, it is a very overrun garden that hasn’t been touched since about 1972, 15-foot-high rose bushes and all, and it’s a good place for the local urban foxes to settle down and raise the cubs. Pictured: teenage cub.
I thought he was a cat when he came down the path, because the neighbours’ cats often stroll through our garden on their daily tour of small-bird murder and mayhem. But when I leant over to look at him, he was not only obviously a fox, but a fox who saw me and came trotting over to say hello. We were about six inches apart from each other, separated by the glass, him sitting on the back doorstep looking curiously at me like he was just dropping by on a social call and what had happened to friendly conversation around here anyway?
Alas, by the time I’d grabbed my iPhone, he’d gone off to investigate the rest of the garden; he’s sniffing some of the feral mint in this picture.
At Edinburgh zoo, in the monkey house. I don’t know if she was showing the monkey its own image or taking a photo with the front-facing camera.
(Nikon D40, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D – bit of a pain that it doesn’t autofocus on this camera, but I love this lens and it worked really well for the low and artificial light in the monkey house. Was mostly shooting with a different lens otherwise today, and experimenting with taking everything in JPEG-Fine to see if I could cut down on motion blurs with fast-moving animals. It did, but I miss the flexibility of shooting in RAW.)
The pigeons on Queen Margaret bridge don’t mind you getting close enough for a photo, but their patience will only last so long.
(Nikon D40, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D, who needs autofocus anyway.)
Playing with my new tripod, close to midnight. Old Victorian townhouses in the West End (now almost all broken up into multiple flats). I love how long the days are here in summer.
(Nikon D40, 18-55 kit lens, tripod, 15-second exposure)
(Nikon D40, Nikkor 50mm 1.8)
From a cross-stitch project I’m working on. Fiddly little annoyances, but they do work here as they’re supposed to, representing poppies in the middle distance.
(iPhone 4S, Olloclip macro lens. Didn’t intend to get the whooshy depth-of-field effects there, but quite like the result.)
It rained all day today. All day. It will continue raining forever, until everything here is washed away, and nobody’s shoes will ever be dry again.
Meanwhile, here’s what one of our placemats look like close up.
(Nikon D40, Tamron SP 90mm 2.5)
The rocket I planted waited until I was away for a week, and then grew wildly in all directions and started flowering. Which is not really what you want from salad. Rather than cut the flowers back, though, I left it alone to see what it would do, and this was the answer:
(Nikon D40, Tamron SP 90mm 2.5, grubby knees from kneeling on the decking)
