Tag Archives: clouds

Puget Sound

Watery reflections

April 27, 2021 XingfuMama 3 Comments

Fern Cove Preserve on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. For Jez’s Water Water Everywhere.

home

What’s it going to be?

March 8, 2021 XingfuMama 2 Comments

Friday night’s sky was interesting:

The weather report for the weekend was “scattered rain”. It sounds so tame compared to the dramatic skies we saw:

Late morning on Sunday. This was typical of the skies we saw this weekend.

For Hammad Rais’s Weekend Sky.

Uncategorized

February dusk

Image March 3, 2021 XingfuMama 6 Comments

For Bushboy’s Last on the card February 2021.

Seattle

Clouding up

January 25, 2021 XingfuMama 3 Comments

Awoke to bright sunshine, but now it’s clouding up.

For Becky of Winchester’s Square Up Challenge.

Snapshots from a Happy Life

Heading up above the clouds

January 12, 2021 XingfuMama 2 Comments

From my last flight, last March to retrieve my Dad before lock downs started. Soooo long ago.

For Becky of Winchester’s Square Up Challenge.

England, Hadrian's Wall Walk

Pink piled up in the sky

January 11, 2021 XingfuMama 2 Comments

Setting sun lighting up a pile of clouds in a view across Solway Forth toward Scotland around mid-summer. — This is what I think of as a castle in the sky.

For Becky of Winchester’s Square Up Challenge.

Seattle

Lit up

January 4, 2021 XingfuMama 7 Comments

For Becky of Winchester’s Square Up Challenge.

Seattle

Peek-a-boo blue up above

January 3, 2021 XingfuMama 5 Comments

From looking up while I walked the dogs this morning:

A peek of blue between clouds and a nest up in a tree.

For Becky of Winchester’s Square Up and Hammad Rais’s Weekend Sky.

Random Reflections

2020 Hindsight

December 31, 2020 XingfuMama 13 Comments

A year of flowers, clouds, raindrops…

I just finished going back through the posts from this year, a longer project than expected. I posted a lot this year, including two months where I posted at least once a day!

Going through the posts, I noticed a few trends: lots of flowers, mostly taken while walking the dogs around the neighborhood:

Lots of sky photos with dramatic clouds, mostly taken locally (Puget Sound region), although New Zealand had some great clouds as well:

The Olympic Mountains just after sunset.

…And raindrops: a lot of pictures with close-ups of raindrops, perhaps a sign of spending most of my year in Seattle:

Close-up of an aster covered with raindrops.

I’ve also been spending time learning about photo processing. I learned how to take things for a spin (and a lot about blending modes in the process):

…And spent quite a bit of time learning about black and white:

These experiments, and wanting to give myself some structure around keeping the experimentation up, led me to start a new monthly challenge on my other website:

The one-to-three photo processing challenge an opportunity to try out new techniques and share what you have created.

In conclusion

I was not in a great place as the year started, because of some turmoil in the family. Until I reread the first post from 2020 : Another year over…I’d forgotten how depressed I was! I even left my 2018 wrap up in the featured block because it wasn’t sad. Turns out my conclusion was almost foresight, although not in the way I would have predicted!

We were truly blessed to have been able to spend some time with our son over Chinese New Year, we met in the middle (more or less) in New Zealand, and the pandemic was rearing its ugly head as we parted.

Since parting we message daily and have a video talk once a week. We are so fortunate to have these connecting technologies. It was so much more difficult for families living apart during the 1918 flu…most people didn’t even have telephones in those days!

So ends 2020.

I am opposed to making New Year’s resolutions and too many things are up in the air right now to make predictions…maybe it has always been so and, until now, we just didn’t realize how fragile our norms were.