Project 365 day 344: All that's left

This is all that's left of the Japanese anemones, which flowered gloriously for many weeks and then gave me bright green seed heads and stark shadows on the wall. Now the pompoms have withered to shrunken brown and grey spheres. A lot of the garden is looking rather sad just now: there is a huge amount of clearing up to do, yet some of the cutting back has removed patches of tangled growth and weeds with shapes I've enjoyed photographing. When P tackled tall weeds down one side of the garden, I rushed out to tell him I would need the teasels for winter photos - but now they are an isolated patch of sagging vegetation to be viewed only in close-up. 

It was a bright morning though, so I took the macro lens outside; I've been struggling with it recently in low light, when I can't keep speeds high enough to shoot hand held images reliably. Even around midday a lot of areas were in quite deep shade, but as well as the teasel extra, I enjoyed observing tiny, downy buds on a hazel, ivy flowers at various stages of becoming berries, and autumn raspberries still trying to fruit. 

I'm posting a day late because J and I had a movie night, watching Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is currently available on BBC iPlayer in the UK. I liked it: it builds slowly, and is beautifully and carefully shot with very painterly cinematography, and plays with themes of the gaze, representation and the relationships between artist and subject. I've wanted to look at Sciamma's work for a while - I far too rarely set aside an evening for a film - and I'm now keen to see more.