all on its own

Just the other day I took a picture of a lone daisy on my front lawn.  As I was laying down on the grass to get my photo, two thoughts entered my mind.  Firstly, and more urgently, I wondered how I was going to get up, and secondly my mind was taken right back to my childhood.

I lived in a white house in quite a remote location on a very quiet, very narrow country road that linked the villages of Peniel Green and Heol Las, surrounded by fields and trees which turned the road into a verdant, leafy tunnel.

warning -brat alert

Stepping out of the back door of my house onto the small concrete yard, a right turn led to two (to me gigantic) steps which in turn led to the garden path.

To the left was a walled off border to contain mint that my mother used to make sauce with whenever we had roast lamb.  Beyond that were rose bushes and a ramshackle brick wall which when I could see over it revealed a field usually full of dairy cows.

Keeping the cows company, some blackberry bushes growing in the field spilled over into our garden in the summer months, providing a seemingly endless harvest of fruit.

To the right of the path was the main garden.  Further away was a large vegetable patch where I used to sit and pick delicious, fresh, earth covered radishes and carrots from the ground or garden peas from their pod and secretly eat them.  And beyond that stood an old brick structure which once housed the toilet!

Closest to the house there was a remnant of the war - an Anderson air raid shelter complete with its rusty, corrugated roof and dark, damp interior that I rarely dared go into.

But between that shelter and the vegetables was my favourite part of the garden - the lawn. It was where I played football, rugby and cricket.  It had two apple trees on it.  One for eating apples (a term I never understood - I mean you can eat them all, right?) and one for "cookers" which grew the apples my mother used to make delicious pies with most Sundays.

And on the lawn, growing under the apple trees, amongst the lush, soft grass there were always daisies.  

It was that solitary daisy growing on my front lawn that was responsible for taking me back over fifty years, and bringing all the love for my huge garden playground back to mind.  The power of imagery, yes?

Of course, I just had to photograph it - but how?  I didn't just want a simple document of the flower, I wanted some art to hang on my wall and a permanent reminder of my childhood memory.

In the end I settled for putting my camera directly on the ground, focusing on the daisy and using a very shallow depth of field to throw the rest of the scene into a bokeh blur.  The camera's precarious resting place meant that I had to employ a 10 second delay after pressing the shutter to ensure it was settled and still.

Here is my masterpiece!

Fujifilm X-T4, Nikon 105mm f2.8 Macro, Beschoi Nikon X to Fujifilm X mount adapter
1/250th of a second at f4, ISO 160
self-timed release

And yes, I did manage to get up off the ground, print, frame and hang the picture in my hallway.  Whenever I look at it, I can now be whisked back to those happy days playing in the garden and eating its lovely produce.

No video to look forward (?!) to this week, and I'm also going to take one of my short breaks from blogging for a few days.  See you all on the 16th :-)