September Challenge - Bloom/Gift

Day 16 of DDW's September daily challenge - Bloom and a dip into HeartFreek's challenge - Gift.

We started today with a wander around Brugge in daylight before going on to the In Flanders Fields museum. It was very different to what we had expected, but still very worth the visit. Based in the old Cloth Hall in Ypres (now Leper) which was virtually destroyed in WW1, it is a very moving and balanced recording and presentation about one of the lowest points in the history of humanity.

There has been a magnificent restoration job done on the hall which stands in the main square, vast in scale and very difficult to photograph, even with the widest angle lenses. This is a stitched panorama from 18 images (in portrait format) at 16mm, it took that many as at that wide an angle the visual distortions are so great I needed to allow the stitching software to select pixels only from the centre of the image. It still ended up as a semi-automatic stitch, rather than fully automatic as I needed to set the stitch points in order to get it to work at all.

In the corner is the "Poppy" watch that you get in order to gain access to the interactive elements of the exhibition. Worth looking large, even though there is still some refining to be done.

So to get on theme, my bloom is the "poppy" and the gift - that of our modern freedoms won through the sacrifices of millions in 2 world wars.

I'm a little behind in posting blips at the moment, but I will catch up. (Tomorrow's is here!)

Too serious a subject to have the Woodman's being silly in.