Day 3: Friiiiiiday

Yes, it's Friday - woohoo! In thinking about what to photograph yesterday it dawned on me that in order to make this project work, I can't just sit back and let every day present me with a photo-op. There has to be some planning involved, such as knowing about the Storm the Wall event next week which should offer one or more shots. It was no accident that I started this project on a day I took plenty of photos. I already have a few ideas in mind, but I want to leave them for days when I can't get out somewhere, or can't be bothered to get out somewhere :-)

Weekends should be easier and, at least for now as we head towards summer, weekday evenings might also offer the chance to see something worth photographing. But the main challenge is going to be during the working week, especially on rainy days. I'm lucky in that I work somewhere with plenty of nature to photograph, and I like to photograph nature :-) Plus I've been needing an excuse to get out of my chair more often, so maybe it'll work out after all.

Of course I wrote the above before I went in search of a photo, and was on my way home when I discovered that the camera had no memory card in it. Here I was with some lovely budding oregon grape (aka mahonia) and no way to take its picture. Hmmm... It was a dull windy evening and it didn't seem possible that I'd get any decent chances at finding a subject. I caught the bus home, emptied my bag and picked up the other camera before catching another bus up to the nearby liquor store for Friday evening beverages.

I got off the bus and was surprised to be greeted by sunshine and blue sky! OK surely I must be able to find something now. I tried a couple of shots of the construction site that used to be a supermarket before heading into the liquor store. I decided to walk home afterwards, hoping that there'd be some nice cherry blossom along the way. Sure enough there was, but by now the light was flat and dull again and the blossoms were strongly backlit by the sky.

I found some daffodils, which I normally ignore since I'm not a big fan of them, and then some of this yellow stuff that's growing everywhere at the moment. I later found out it's called Forsythia :-) I liked the yellow flowers (ever noticed how so many early spring flowers are yellow?) against the patch of blue sky. The shot was kinda boring when I first viewed it at home and was leaning towards posting one of the construction shots, but then I did some tweaking of the colours (saturation and levels) and decided I quite liked it after all. Good enough to post.

Friday Forsythia


I must admit I had no idea what it was called when I took the photo, but Google came to my rescue. I entered "shrub tree yellow flowers" and the top result was a UK gardening site which listed the plants with yellow flowers. On the third page I recognized what I'd taken a photo of. A quick Google image and Flickr search confirmed it. As to what kind of Forsythia, well that's for the gardening experts - I'm just happy I got a photo...