Ingela Bohm's Blog, page 36

Bumblebees

This year is a bumblebee year. They’re everywhere. Small, round and fluffy, they bumble about (well, they would!) and raid the summer flowers of their sweetness. This one seemed to be resting after the rain, nestled on the underside of a half overblown tiger lily.

Look how it almost seems to grab the petals and hold the entire flower together!

 

 

In the pink

I just came back in from a spur-of-the-moment photo walk. I simply had to go out when I saw the mist gathering at the edges of the forest.

It was magical. The air itself was pink!

As I walked along the exercise trail, the wet grass swished against my calves and the mosquitos hovered around me. All around me, there was mist, forest and willow herb – the Swedish summer flower. It’s considered a weed here, and yet it’s so beautiful!

More pink. I couldn’t believe it was real. All alone out in the woods at midnight, with only the bright summer sky to watch over me.

As I returned home, twilight had sunk over the creek. I went out onto the jetty and placed my tripod at the very edge to take these pictures. The jetty bounced gently beneath my feet as I clicked the shutter and captured this scene of utter calm and quiet.

Finally, I’d like to give cred to my greatest inspiration Jonna Jinton, who recently went viral with a cow herding call.[image error] If you haven’t checked out her awesome photo blog, do yourself a favour and head over there now. If not for her, I might not have bought a camera at all. Anything I do, she can do better!

Cloudy walk

So today I forgot to set the image quality to RAW because I faffed around with HDR yesterday, so I couldn’t do the usual fiddling with contrast etc afterwards. Also, the clouds that looked so dramatic from my office window were really just… clouds.

So. Overcast day, unprocessed pics. It happens. At least the blueberries are ripening – yum!

And this little fella accompanied me for about a mile, flying before me and landing every few feet as if to pose.

These birch stumps looked like a round table debate abandoned in haste.

And more of the usual: mountains fading into distant blue.

Midnight mist

It doesn’t matter that I’ve lived here all my life – I still think these bright summer nights are magical. And mist! I love mist. It makes everything so mysterious, even the most mundane views – like a derelict building.

I keep coming back to this one lake. The sun sets behind those hills in the summer, and it reflects so beautifully in the water.

What is it about children’s things that makes them so spooky when they’re abandoned?

Something completely different

We went on holiday and I didn’t take my camera with me, because I didn’t want to feel obligated to take good pictures all the time (and in hindsight I’m glad I never handled it with my sunscreen-y fingers). So these are just a collection of pics from my phone, as a break in the Swedish humdrum.

If there’s something I love, it’s mountains. Also, look at the colour of that sea! Alanya from above.

At home, we have a poor struggling creature in a flower pot. It doesn’t look like this:

Another thing I love is ruins. There’s just something comforting about everything coming to an end, and I like fantasizing about lives long gone, since anything is possible.

These were everywhere.

I had to take one sunset photo.[image error]

Mist on a creek

Midsummer’s eve

Cheers! Midsummer is a huge deal in Sweden, second only to Christmas (and for some, not even that). I spent mine at our cabin in the woods, basking in the somewhat unexpected sun and fending off the odd mosquito.

The wild roses haven’t quite got there yet, but they’re coming. The cranesbill was out en masse, though.

No trip to the cabin is complete without a good campfire and a fishing expedition. Preparations are underway.

We got a pike!

I’m such a sucker for forest paths. This one leads from our cabin to untold adventures.

Since it’s midsummer, the sun only sets for a couple of hours. This pic was taken at around eleven in the evening.

Later still, the sun dipped below the horizon.

At midnight, a mist swept in and shrouded the landscape in gauze.

At half past midnight, I took a final picture (below) and headed back to the cabin for some shuteye. The barest hint of pink in the sky tells me it’s summer and all is well with the world…[image error]

Discounted m/m romance

Feeling generous! To celebrate the end of the semester, I’ve lowered the prices on four of my novels to 0.99. You can find them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, iBooks and loads of other places.

First attempt at bracketing

Last night wasn’t great for photographing, but I just had to try out what I’ve just learnt about bracketing. Unfortunately, I transferred the images and erased them from the camera before I read the instructions that said you merge them in camera…

So I did it in paint.net instead, following these instructions. For a first attempt, I’m okay with it. The shoreline looks a bit artificial, but I didn’t do anything to fix that, since the image itself is nothing much. Hoping for more spectacular clouds tonight.[image error]

Another view

This time w/o dead tree.

Jeez, it looks like an old postcard…