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Sometimes I think I owe such sanity as I have left to the animals.
Other times I wonder whether they actually make things worse. Such lack of complication. Such love of the sun. Of course they fight a lot of the time too. Like, yes. Them. |
Big nose
I have, under rather regrettable circumstances, acquired another camera. It has a fixed 21mm wide angle lens. Which means I can attempt to convey the impression that Maizy is cute in that head-bigger-than-body way that’s the hallmark of such lenses.
I say attempt because firstly her nose is out of focus and secondly she isn’t cute at all. A split second after the shutter clicked she leapt at me and both I and the camera were liberally smeared with mud.
It’s got a fantastic macro and is altogether a very exciting bit of kit. I’ve been experimenting with it and all the pictures I posted today and yesterday at flickr were taken with it. Apart from the sunflower, which is a few days older but got left behind for some reason.
qarrtsiluni and the making of images
Hard to say, even harder to spell. But gorgeous to visit. It, qarrtsiluni, is a collaborative literary/artistic space/blog which invites contributions from the big wide world to its regularly-changing themes.
Why am I mentioning it now? Well, obviously, because I’ve just had something published there. And I’m really excited about it.
It’s a bit of a new departure for me, entirely inspired by the current editors, Dave Bonta and Beth Adams. For the previous theme, short shorts they asked me to submit an image in response to a piece of writing – Fish by Zhoen. So I did, and I’m reproducing it below. (I also, incidentally, contributed some words to that theme.)
It’s my first attempt at both responding visually to someone else’s work and at making something rather than taking a straightforward picture. I’m still absurdly pleased with the result and use it as my avatar on all possible occasions even though for most purposes the image ends up so small as to be unreadable.
So right now the theme at qarrtsiluni is education and I was asked to respond to the most amazing piece of writing – Professor Lucifer in the Arena of Angels – by the poet Karl Elder.
You’ll see from reading it that it’s absolutely stuffed full of multi-layered images and meaning, and I had a brilliant time pulling stuff together. In fact most of the elements of the most recent image are from my recent holiday on the Island of Arran and Holy Isle. The brain (not a real one) was taken on my trip to Montreal earlier this year and the glorious darling Maizy who flies in triplicate across the sky did so originally on the beach in France last summer.
It would be so exciting if anybody else felt moved to make an image in response to that poem, or any other writing. Or, of course, contribute more words for image-makers to respond to! Details of how to contact the editors are here.
frizzyLogic 