An amateur photographer’s personal journey
Here is an unexpected shot… all I intended was to take a photograph of the spider on the buttercup, when in flew an unexpected visitor, the spider’s next victim. Notice how the spider hangs his victims from silk threads - ready to be eaten at a later time.
See also :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranunculus
This Dog Rose was neatly folded (resembling an orchid). It’s creator, a crab spider, lay in wait inside.
This caterpillar was part of a colony of some 20 or so individuals enclosed in silk threads. On being disturbed it threw itself out on a invisible silken thread and hung suspended in the air.
Crab spiders often catch large insects such as bees. It seems this fellow was on his hors d’oeuvre. The fly in its jaws was so small that I didn’t notice it whan I took the shot.
It is unfrequent to be so pleasantly surprised. On a weekend drive out of Paris I stumbled almost by accident on the hamlet of Lavacourt on the River Seine and its small Restaurant-Bar-Tabac “Chez Charlot”. Immediately opposite lay the village of Vetheuil - a village made timeless by Monet who lived there in the 1880s.
No better invitation could there have been to settle down to a simple lunch of “poulet frites” and a “pichet” of red wine. What else could one ask for?
The village of Vetheuil as seen from the hamlet of Lavacourt (captured by mobile phone).
And the same scene rendered timeless by Claude Monet some 120 years earlier (painted in oils!).
Here is another of Vetheuil in the Winter. Je pense q’une autre visite s’impose!
Find out more about Claude Monet.
Auguries of Innocence
by William Blake
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
The hundreds of thousands of reinforced concrete bunkers that dot the Albanian landscape are a sinister reminder of the paranoia of Enver Hoxha’s dictatorship. They will no doubt remain a scare on the landscape for hundreds of years to come.
