Gap (1)

New theme... GAP 

Fish - not!

a whole week missed... the theme was fish and i just couldn't get inspired.... here's what they did on the Viewfinder Blog! 

 

10 (5)

and ten monkey toes...

10 (4)

ten monkey fingers....

BBC News - Your pictures: The night

BBC News - Your pictures: The night  

From the viewfinder Blog on BBC Website.

10(3)

10 (2)

10 (1)

Wednesday - another new topic... This Sunday is 10/10/10, so this week's theme is 10! 

opening times

The Night (5)

The Mouse sleeps.

The Night (4)

Clear night, calm water, beautiful reflections. unfortunately only my phone to take pictures with.... but still lovely I think. The red "spike" is the chimney of the power station... with the fibonacci numbers in neon!

The Night (3)

ripples on the river

BBC News - Your pictures: My home town

BBC News - Your pictures: My home town 

Viewfinder Blog's choices for last week's theme.

The Night (2)

The Night (1)

These were taken at 2330. I love the summer nights, but I do miss the stars!

My Home Town (7)

Turku is a city bordered by the sea to the south & west and countryside to the north & east. When we first moved to Turku, we lived in a small "village" 2km to the east of the city. Between the village and the main road into the city is a farm. This picture was taken across the valley to the farm in September 2007.

My Home Town (6)

The Aura River is my favourite part of the city. In  winter the river freezes, the föri (ferry) takes a break and a wooden foot bridge replaces it giving perfect access to walk on the frozen, snowy ice.

 

 

My Home Town (5)

In 2011 Turku is one of 2 European Capitals of Culture - the other is Tallinn in Estonia, just across the Baltic. In June this year Turkuun Turkkuun! was a celebration in the market square to launch the programme for 2001. A warm sunny summer's evening with music, friends and orange balloons!

My Home Town (4)

Turku Castle

 

 

My home town (3)

Turku was recently "invaded" by a NATO fleet prior to an exercise in the Baltic.

Ancient & Modern

The rarely seen and this time corrected named Union JACK!

A Swedish Submarine

Believe it or not, this is an invisible ship!

Our very own Suomen Juotsen and visitors

Swedish Invasion!

My home town (2)

Turku, Finland is now my home town.  

This is Turku Cathedral, the Mother Church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Finland, enjoying the changing seasons! 

We regularly attend the international services in a chapel here.

BBC News - Your pictures: School days

Last week's theme of School Days - these are the picture chosen on the BBC Viewfinder Blog. I was a bit disappointed by these pics... not sure why really. 

BBC News - Your pictures: School days

my home town (1)

I grew up in the Royal London Borough of Kingston upon Thames, Surrey. It is one of only 2 Royal London Boroughs, the other being Kensington & Chelsea. In 2012, Greenwich will become the third Royal London Borough.

The town was named for the King's Stone, where seven saxon kings were crowned. One of them was King Athelstan, after whom my primary school was named.

The toppled phone boxes, officially titled "out of order" was created in 1988 and has become the popular symbol of Kingston, being used as such on the London 2012 Olympic pin for the borough.

School Days (6)

 

James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot, London Visitors, 1874. 

Obviously long before my time, but the boys in "bluecoat" uniform in this painting are pupils of Christ's Hospital, where I was at school from age 12-18. The school itself has a long and rich history being founded as a charitable foundation in 1552 by Edward VI on Newgate Street in the City of London for the education of poor children. The first name on the roll was a girl, and the school has always educated both boys & girls, although from 1707 until 1985, the girls were in Hertford and from 1902 the boys were in Horsham, Sussex. I was one of the few pupils to have been part of the move from Hertford to Horsham when the boys & girls finally came back together on the same site. The school boasts a number of famous "Old Blues" including Barnes Wallis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sir Colin Davis. 

oh, and they still wear that uniform today! 

new theme tomorrow - "My Home Town"

School Days (5)

Inside Monkey's Playschool... in fact this is from the pre-school classroom, so for six year olds.

School Days (4)

School Days (3)

 my sister's first day at primary school.... don't we look smart?
She was 4 and I was 8

School Days (2)

My first school photo - aged 4. The jumper was red.

BBC News - Your pictures: Chaos

I am taking my weekly themes from the BBC Viewfinder Blog. These are the pictures they selected from last weeks submissions on the theme of CHAOS. Nice to see I wasn't the only one considering the chaos theory a.k.a . the Butterfly Effect!

BBC News - Your pictures: Chaos

School Days (1)

"School Days, Schools Days, 

dear old golden rule days, 

reading and writing and arithmetic, 

taught to the sound of a hickory stick!"

School Days by Louis Jordan

This is a favourite of mine - I've loved Louis Jordan since I worked on Five Guys named Moe at the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue... The soundtrack was playing in the foyer all day while I was selling tickets from the box office.

it's nothing to do with my school days, or anyone else's for that matter, just a happy time in my life and a song that reminds me of that time....

 tomorrow - I'll try something a bit more traditional on the theme of school days!

Chaos (6)

"Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere."

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), Italian-born French poet, critic. (1913).

How depressing! Just as I was enjoying some of the regular rhythm of nature.... 

Good job I have art in my life, really....

and that is the end of CHAOS... tomorrow "School Days"

The Chaos (5) Game

I've been struggling with chaos so I resorted to google and I found the chaos game.There are lots of versions of this game. This was the first one i came across.

It's initially an interesting distraction which stretches your brain a little but it's not a picture for the blog.... apparently it's all about creating fractal patterns so I thought... there has to be a picture in that!

The idea is to map a point in an equilateral triangle halfway from the start point and one of the points of the triangle. As soon as the point is made, it becomes the new start point. If you continue doing this long enough, using dice to decide which direction to go in, then after about 30,000 dots, you should have a Sierpinski triangle which looks like this:

which is interesting but not as pretty as this....

which is another fractal pattern!

Try googling "Sierpinski triangle" and you can find lots more pretty fractal patterns... all based on CHAOS THEORY.

CHAOS (4)

I never thought I'd say this... I need more chaos! 

I'm beginning to think that daily pictures on a weekly theme is too much. It is stretching my brain, which is what I wanted to do, but I'm struggling coming up with daily images. 

Maybe it's just this theme - maybe there just isn't that much chaos in my life!

I've been trawling back through recent photographs and there are lots of nature, I wondered about the chaos of leaves on the trees, or even leaves on the ground now they are starting to fall! I considered the petals on the flowers and the beds and borders full of wildflowers. I even thought about blades of grass. I pondered the potential chaos of people on the streets and children in the gardens & parks.

I came to the conclusion that chaos doesn't exist in nature. All of the above have a structure or pattern of their own and are not at all chaotic.

So which photo do I use? Maybe some of the above... just for a little natural un-chaos ;D

Chaos (3)

This is our winter buggy. I include it today, not for the pretty camoflage pattern but for the chaotic moments that normally occur just before leaving the house for the school run. Last week it was expounded by the sudden realisation that we had left the summer buggy in the car the night before and J had driven off with it for the day... I had a moment of sheer panic... how to get the mouse and the monkey to playschool without a buggy! Then I remembered the winter buggy packed away, awaiting the arrival of snow and I breathed a little sigh of relief...