My walk this week is in the recently re-opened Swansea Botanic Garden and Singleton Park. The Botanic Garden is within the park and had been closed for the coronavirus lockdown.
And thinking of lockdowns and locks, the sound of a garden attendant locking up at an earlier time than would normally be the case, is featured in the soundscape below and took us a little by surprise. We had not been there very long but enjoyed continuing our walk in the park, taking a different route from that on our last visit.
The garden and park were looking beautiful with so many flowers on display, it was a real pleasure to be there and sit quietly for a short while looking at all the colours and listening to the birds and ambience of the area.
What would we do without these natural (albeit cultivated) spaces in our urban landscapes?
My walk this week looks and listens to some botanical beauty in Swansea’s Singleton Park. It is late Spring and new arrangements have been made in the formal garden and the colours abound in the less formal areas.
Swansea Botanic Gardens
The hot-house is exotic with the blooming of enormous bright flowers and the sound of running water accompanies the humidity in one section while fading away in the cactus house. The twisting paths both inside and out give a sense of exploration and discovery as you round a corner or enter a “tunnel” and find another colourful viewpoint or vista.
Swansea Botanic Soundscape
Sitting in the peacefulness of the arranged beds, listening to the birds and the gentle hoeing of the gardeners, Continue reading→
My walk this week is at the National Botanic Garden of Wales where there was some weathering they could not control. Outside the Great Glasshouse the sun and rain, heat and cold have taken their toll on this metal plant label and the paint has cracked and peeled into a most interesting, map-like pattern.
Inside the Great Glasshouse they can and do control the weather conditions for the different parts of the world represented there. So while there are times of year when everything in there seems so busy with growth, there are always fantastic colours, patterns and textures to enjoy whatever the time of year.Continue reading→
Leaving Singleton Park in Swansea at the end of my walk this week around the botanic and ornamental gardens, we exited by the north entrance gates and found as much green growth on them as everywhere else in the park.Continue reading→
My walk this week is perhaps less of a walk and more of a showcase. We had a slow amble round Swansea’s botanic gardens in Singleton Park on a day that was dry but could have been brighter. Well, I say brighter but I mean sunnier as there was plenty of brightness Continue reading→
Towards the end of September we visited the National Botanic Garden of Wales (NBGW) – it is a place we go whenever the opportunity arises as it is so beautiful and has a wide range of environments. The weather was excellent on this particular day, so I hope that you will join me on this week’s walk posts and enjoy some of the details of the gardens.
The gardens are visited by many photographers, professional and amateur alike, as it gives such a good opportunity to photograph the wide range of plants both in the grounds and in the Great Glass House. My photos this week are a selection of those I took on this September visit and although they are mostly shots of plants and flowers, you can see a wider view of the gardens through their film or virtual tour on their website.
That new app I have on my iPhone (PureShot) allows HI_Quality and MAX_Quality jpeg photos and also TIFF lossless photos. The TIFF format in this case is not only lossless but is dRAW which means there is no in-app post processing done and no compression applied.
For those of you unaware of the ins and out, ups and downs of formats in photography, suffice it to say that the JPEG format takes away information gathered by the camera to a greater or lesser extent, thus the photographic information is compressed. TIFF is a lossless format which, although giving bigger file sizes, means there is no loss of information and, therefore, greater control for the photographer over how the finished image looks as well as (theoretically) a higher quality of image (at least in terms of the number of pixels used).
The image of the Witch Hazel below was taken in TIFF dRAW format and the close up of another Witch Hazel in the Botanic Garden of Wales was taken in JPEG format. Obviously you cannot make a straight comparison between the two formats here because the images are different but one thing I would say about the PureShot app and the Apple Camera app is that whilst it may be true that PureShot allows more control at the shooting stage (and I was very pleased with the results I got with PureShot), the Camera app is also very good.
There are many things that need to be taken into consideration when taking photographs but as far as the kit and applications are concerned, having a decent lens is probably the single thing that makes the biggest difference. Apple (and I am sure other high end smart phones with which I have no experience) made the right decision when they installed a decent lens in the iPhone.
You can use the Donate button below to help StillWalks. Pay how much you want and receive a high quality download of this week’s featured StillWalks video – “Winter Lakeside Walk” which features Llyn Llech Owain Country Park in Carmartheshire. Click the image below to watch the video. DVD Collections are available to order in the StillWalks Shop.
Last week we had a walk at the National Botanic Garden of Wales (NBGW), taking advantage of free entry during January. It is easy to think that there is not so much to see in a place like the Botanic Gardens at this time of year but, of course, that is not true – it is just that things look different.
I had downloaded a new app for my iPhone 5c, namely PureShot, and I was keen to try it out. This camera app allows more control than the standard iPhone Camera app as well as having options to use TIFF images and different quality JPEGs. The photos below were both taken using PureShot and it gave good results. However, as will be seen through other shots I will be posting this week, it is not always the best app to use.
I discovered PureShot through the a post by Emil Pakarklis and the iPhone Photography School and would recommend his website as an excellent aid to anyone interested in improving their phone photography.
Another discovery I made when looking at images of Silver Birch bark was esdesigns – I liked the silver birch bracelet in particular!
You can use the Donate button below to help StillWalks. Pay how much you want and receive a high quality download of this week’s featured StillWalks video – “Winter Lakeside Walk” which features Llyn Llech Owain Country Park in Carmartheshire. Click the image below to watch the video. DVD Collections are available to order in the StillWalks Shop.
