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'painting' made by sheep gathering around a salt lick.
connected russhes in a circualr curtain, looking up towards the skylight
detail of a large image made with bracken
A passage between to walls of oak branches. A 'sun burst' of reeds at the end

Andy Goldsworthy | Fifty Years | National Galleries of Scotland

Goldsworthy is internationally recognised for his work with natural materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves, snow and ice

I have seen Mr Goldsworthy’s work online as I used it as inspiration for my classes when outdoor learning. I really enjoyed this exhibit, the bigger pieces were amazing. I also really enjoyed seeing the development of work made over many years using the same places. You also got the impression of his mastery of techniques for using natural materials. Some of the photos of work made with leaves looked as if some camera filtering was going on until you looked really closely. My photos don’t start give an idea. Worth looking at the exhibition page, or visiting. Recommended.

I’d have loved to have a class of pupils roam through the exhibition, and allowed them to touch run about and talk noisily. Then head outside.

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Read: Winter Ali Smith ★★★★★ 📚
Amazing book, floats between time and characters, dreams & hallucinations. Funny too.

Her sister Iris is making nothing of her life. Sophia thinks of their mother, when Iris worked at the filling station, telling anyone who asked how her daughters were doing that Iris had a good position in an oil company.

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Packaging for the "World’s Sharpest Knife," showing a serrated blade cutting a red tomato and marketing text.

I think it must have been about 20 years ago. I was in the supermarket and they had a guy demonstrating these kitchen knives. He sliced a lot of things up quickly, thinly and efficiently.

The knives, from China had lifetime guarantee.
I noticed he had a lot of plasters on his fingers.
There was a deal where you could buy 3 of the larger sized ones very cheaply. I bought 3, a very small paring knife and a fish filleting knife.

Later as I left the store I saw the salesman being handed over by the security guards to some policemen. I think he had been shoplifting.

I’ve still got the knives. Most of them are still quite sharp. I now prefer my heavier cook’s knife for chopping most things. They are good bread knives.

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Speckeld wood butterfly, wings outstretches resting on a stone

Flickr By Month

A while ago I thought it might be interesting to be able to search Flickr and organise the results by the month that the photos were taken. Over the last couple of days I’ve made the system a little better. The page searches my Flickr photos and displays them in the months they were taken.

I’ve changed the default search to butterfly as I am taking quite a lot of photos of them at the moment. It is potentially useful to be able to see what to expect at different times of the year. The page takes a parameter of t to display a different search:

https://johnjohnston.info/flickrcal/?t=bird

The main change I made was to add some caching, getting the results of a Flickr search can be slow, so this speeds up repeated searches. I also made the sorting a bit more logical. The display of thumbnails is basic and they just link back to Flickr. I might think of making them look a little better maybe opening a lightbox? I also hope to deal with results of > 500 where I would need more than one call to the Flickr api.

This fits very well with my approach to photography. I think of my photos like a diary rather than great photos. I am still shooting auto 99% of the time. I enjoy looking back at pictures in the same way as I like reading old blog posts. I also think it could become more useful over the yeas in letting me know what to look out for.

I also wonder if I could use the same idea for a search of everyone’s photos using a bounding box to limit the area.

The featured image is of a specked wood, my current favourite butterfly.