Some pictures must be taken, some things must be blogged. Photography and pop culture.
That one time I took pictures in Heaton Park on Boxing Day and they came out blue.
Yes, it’s the same day as the photo in this post.
It was something new for me, as I don’t go to Heaton Park in winter and I definitely don’t go anywhere during Christmas time. I was glorious!
Do you ever get pleasure from experiencing something so tiny or so trivial for the first time?
… is a sunset.
In my last blog entry I shared the photos from my trip to Southport, but that wasn’t the whole trip. That same day, I also visited Formby, a town on the coast near Liverpool. Formby is known for its sand dunes, pinewoods and wildlife–apparently it’s a habitat of the endangered red squirrel, though I haven’t seen any (truth be told, I didn’t have much time, I literally ran from the train station to the beach, took pics and ran back, as it was quite late and I wanted to return to Manchester at reasonable hour).
Anyway, Formby is absolutely gorgeous, see for yourselves:
The pinewoods are conserved by National Trust, for the above mentioned wildlife.
Today, let me share with you some photos from my trip to Southport. Southport is a seaside town in Merseyside, North West England, over an hour by train from Manchester.
The bottom two are smartphone shots.
This trip meant a lot to me because this was the first time in ten years that I felt seawater. The tide was low as you can see, so I just took off my shoes and socks and went right in. I walked way, way past the pier. Of course, not being used to such hot weather (yeah, what’s up with that?) since moving to UK and not having been on the beach for a decade, I forgot I should have applied the sun cream regularly. Shrug, a bit of a sunburn won’t kill me.
Anyone here knows Souhtport?
As promised in my previous post, here are some pictures of Abney Park.
Water lilies, but no ducks or geese here.
So, WordPress peeps, have you ever visited a place that was connected to your favourite author? Whether it was a setting of their book or somewhere the author lived or frequented. Tell me in the comments!
Hello world, it’s Sunday again, which means Gloomscapes.
Lucky number thirteen it is today and so it has to be, of course, District 13 from the Hunger Games trilogy.
A mockingjay. Just a glimpse of it as it flies by. The same one every time.
~Susan Collins, Catching Fire (Hunger Games #2)
Mockingjay is, in the Hunger Games universe, a fictional hybrid bird, which becomes a symbol of Resistance. It’s also the title of the third book. When I viewed this picture on my computer and saw the flying bird, I was immediately reminded of the above quote from Catching Fire. I’m glad I got a chance to post it on the blog finally!
#KeepOnGloomin’
What’s my favourite place?
The one that has unapologetically featured on this blog from the very beginning–Heaton Park in Manchester.
You feel like you’re in the middle of the woods without having left the city.
I go there in spring, summer and autumn and I always take a lot of pictures. I have more photographs from Heaton Park on my hard drive than any other place.
It’s been good doing the Weekly Photo Challenge again!
What am I laughing at?
Well, nothing. It’s a different ha-ha I’m talking about today.
A ha-ha is a type of a wall (keeping the theme here) that keeps livestock out but doesn’t ruin the view.
Heaton Park in Manchester has them and here I give you some pictures:
Naturally, the first question one asks is, how the hell did they get that name? From Wikipedia:
The unusual name “ha-ha” is thought to have stemmed from the exclamations of surprise by those coming across them as the walls were designed to be invisible.
It’s a good job those coming across weren’t swearing. Otherwise we’d have to call them fuck-where-did-this-come-from.
Greetings, humans and other creatures, today I present you with the first post in my new series, which I sort of touched on previously.
The idea is to post photographs that could represent a setting of post-apocalyptic or dystopian world, or are just generally uninviting, gloomy or not very aesthetically pleasing.
In March last year I set out with my camera towards Hexagon Tower with the intention of taking precisely these types of pictures, as I knew the area surrounding the building had just the right look and feel and the weather conditions were just perfect. It still remains one of my favourite photo-walks. However, there was no good way of putting these pics here (well, apart from the above mentioned Hexagon Tower and the Birches in March, but those are different). Then it occurred to me to do a series and so here it is!
The hardest part was coming up with a title. I spent the whole evening coming up with different doomy-gloomy portmanteaus, all of which, after checking with Google, were already a thing–mostly video games or metal albums. (*Gasps* But I’m not cool! I’ve never played a video game in my life and I listen to pop!!) And of course it doesn’t help when 1. English is not your first language and 2. you’ve got absolutely no way with words anyway (and to think that I wanted to be a writer once… sigh). I thought if it comes to the worst, I’ll just go with Wastelands. I wasn’t that thrilled with that, though I’ll still use it as a tag.
I’m pleased to say I did find my title.
Gloomscapes it is!
And here’s the first instalment.
I will be posting these every week, on Sundays, since it’s Sunday now.
Welcome and I hope you enjoy the show!
Well it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these! Late to the party but here it is:
The hardest thing about this Weekly Photo Challenge has been choosing the right picture–I have so many that would qualify. In the end this one won. This little piece of woodland is Prestwich Clough in Manchester and I discovered it in April 2017.
It’s amazing how quiet a place in a city, that is not even very far from a main road can be. It must be the trees.
I remember reading a children’s story back in my home country about a guy who collected silence and he had this big house with many rooms and every room had a different type of silence. Forest silence, beach silence, field silence, cave silence and so on and so on. Anne Shirley in Anne of Windy Poplars also talks about different types of silence in her letter to Gilbert.
I’m sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell just where I was by the quality of the silence about me.
So it’s never a total silence then. I imagine that would only be in space.
Break the Silence
I’ve been going back and forth with this paragraph, typing and deleting, typing again and deleting again. This is only a photo posting challenge, nothing more but even Cheri asks at the end of her post whether silence can be a negative thing. Because I believe it can (in a different sense than my photograph) and I was thinking about the #MeToo movement and other horrible things that have been happening and are happening, so I just want to add this: if you see a case of injustice happening, please do speak up.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
~Martin Luther King, Jr
Some Photoblog 