Making do with cheap glass

I had my day off yesterday and now need to buckle down to preparing for the local council elections. Helena is away in West Wales and, hopefully, she will arrange to bring back some Barabrith from Jen's Pantry in Newport for us to devour in short order.

The sun was shining brightly here when I went out with Bomble to try and record the Clematis Montana in the early light, which only then shines on the massive spread of flowers, which are nearly all in bloom. I didn't manage it. I had decided to revert to my original, elderly and rather inept old kit lens from my last camera. After buying some better, though not expensive lenses, I now feel very frustrated with this one as soon as I see the results on screen.

But I needed a wide angle for the Clematis, and this is my only lens option. So in the end, after some poor shots of the Montana, I ventured further down the garden to the Wisteria chinensis which is now bursting with leaf, its new shoots and young delicate leaves, after the flowers had peeked out quite early in the season.

I read about breaking the rules in a magazine yesterday and I felt it resonating within me. I'd tried to shoot with the sun behind me but the results weren't exciting me. This image was shot deliberately using the backlight from the sun as it was just rising over the trees. I liked the dandelions in the background, and I've decided they will be gone by tonight. That, however, assumes I do all my writing and page layout work asap, which is not certain!

I would much prefer to be 'on holiday' and go for a walk and have a siesta in the afternoon, but I am freelance and don't live by the normal rules! I probably wouldn't have it any other way to be fair. Working when everyone else is clogging up the road, and filling the beach, has seemed eminently sensible to me for many decades now. It all started when I bunked off college one day aged eighteen to explore a river bank and the delight of early summer's wildlife, at a period when my eyes seemed to be opening to a new way of seeing, my way, not the way I had been trained.