My dog loves the snow. If he sees it outside he starts agitating to be out to cavort in it. He likes Winter better than Summer.
He’s immune to the cold. He’ll calmly stand in a freezing snowy puddle with blocks of ice floating around his ankles. Oblivious.
The snow and ice are now gone and we’re back to damp misty morning walks.
The last few days have been even colder than previously. We’re at the same latitude as Fort McMurray in Alberta, Riga in Latvia, and Novgorod in Russia. But we have island benefits – which means permafrost is rare.
Permafrost does happen occasionally though. Years ago when I stayed in a remote cottage we went through a really hard spell of weather with four feet of snow. It stayed that way for a while. Our water supply was from a burn up the hill. The burn froze. Then it froze harder Continue reading Frosty Dog Walk.
Today on the morning dog walk it was wet. A relentless gentle drizzle (Scotch mist) made worse by the leaves of the trees aggregating it and turning it into plonking showers at each and every little breeze.
Yesterday though, it was dry with the grass waving in the sunny breezes and the mumbling background sound of the commentary at the Forgandenny horse trials wafting across the valley.
It’s amazing that it takes less than twenty minutes to walk the dog from my city back door to a hill top like this where I can sprawl in the sun on the grass.
Dog walking saved my life. Walking the dog in green spaces sustained me and kept me going long enough to recover from depression. And it was in these places that I haltingly began to draw and take photographs again.
Miserableness was accompanied by apathy and even though I forced myself to carry a pocket camera I struggled to be bothered to use it. However bit by bit I started to take the odd photograph and slowly I even began to sketch again.
I was lucky in that I had two beautiful woods riddled with paths a ten minute walk and a ten minutes drive away respectively. I had no excuse not to take the dog for a walk. For hours at a time Continue reading Dog-walk photographs 01
I’m starting a journey to get good at photography again. Writing about my blunders on these pages gives me a way to look back and measure my progress.
Blunders are the best way to learn. The bigger they are the bigger the lesson. At the beginning they will be huge and I expect to learn lots. But when my photography gets to being OK the blunders will be harder to find and I’ll begin to Continue reading Blundering on photography.