Studying Sunflowers

My daughter Ruth bought a lovely bunch of sunflowers this week. I have been enjoying looking at them, taking a few photos and doing some sketches.

We also had a sunflower self seeded in the path at the front of the house, it seemed right to leave it to flower.

As the weather is getting colder, the sunflowers bring a sense of warmth and summer in the house.

I used my water colour pencils and pen and ink for the sketches and some digital processing for the photographs.

Islington Chapel market and Epping Forest

With two of my themes and interests in mind I was in Islington for one of them, taking photos of street scenes and the market there. It's interesting seeing the effects on me of a lot of recent publicity about photographers being stopped from taking photographs outside in everyday life. I don't find it easy sometimes taking photos in the street, but I do believe that we should be able to do so as artists as well as tourists etc.
It is the increasing money to be made from the ownership of copyright that is causing the problems I think.

Later in the week a friend of mine took me with her to Epping Forest again. It was a lovely day to be in the trees and to see the young ducks and geese on the pond. Taking pictures of trees can be really surprising, when looking at their trunks and branches at first they appear ordinary, yet sometimes in the photograph a spirit type face is looking back at us.