snowdrops

Galanthus nivalis, common snowdrop, flowering on a roadside. My jeans' knees are now dirty :)

fractal feather background

free large format of this image will be available for a week at hiero.ru image hosting. Careful, over 6Mb there

other fractals for sale at shutterstock

instant sunshine

today is quite gloomy here, so a pic from costa del sol with (appropriately) sun in it. Btw, when you fully close the aperture in order to take this type of "star sun" image, what does the number of visible rays depend on? )there are eight of them on this one). My guess is the number of "petals" in the lens, but not sure.

btw2 - not dissimilar picture remains my bestseller on istockphoto site, accumulating over 400 dollars by now. There are pictures with lot more sales there, but they belong to other people, alas)

true colors : photovandalism

almost monochrome image of narrow street in Fuengirola. Was too boring in original shape, so played with it in photoshop and quite like the results :)

perching

Spain, Fuengirola beach. Well, you can't see where it is, you have to take my word for is

full frame at lori

fractal "flying notes"

at lori.ru

another one

at shutterstock

lipsticky lips

it's amazing what Apophysis software can do almost with no input from me



at lori.ru

twisted surfaces

big format on flickr

still snowing

still snowing today. as it is a wrong type of snow (as usual), schools opened in the morning but then closed again.

dragon

I've tried to teach Timur "wet-into-wet-on-limited-area" technique (see example here).
He watched with interest, nodded wisely, said that he understood everything and then produced this dragon - that has nothing to do with the technique, but is very pic in his very own style.

catkins

today's snow

horizontal crop is here

Puzzleball

Yuri completed his Ravensburger Puzzleball

more pics of the same thing - 1, 2, 3, 4

mini-narcissi

there was an image here but now it's gone

since my many photobanks have just one free image per week from millions they have (and some don't have any), I decided to have my own image of the week, and first one can be found here, distributed under creative common license

Job's tears

bought in Cape Town, those were described on the tag simple as "teething beads". I got curious what they were, and found that the "real" name is nice, too - Job's Tears (Coix lacryma-jobi) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job%27s_Tears

the shop where we bought those is amazing and if you are into beads at all and find yourslef (suddenly, I am sure) in Cape town, don't miss it. Prepare a lot of money :)

and if you do click through to the shop - don't forget to click on the Jeep on the main page. bling-bling car

on the top of table mountain

it really was a cloud sitting on the top of the Table Mountain, from time to time it will become suddenly sunny and hot and next moment it's dull and grey again


and this pic was taken two mins later. spot the difference

diggers

Hout Bay beach. By the time Timur finished digging, his lips were purple, bordering on blue. It was very sunny and sun was strong, but water was cold. We saw a seal swimming inside the herbour

the only gap

when we went up the Table Mountain on the 2nd of January, "tablecloth", the cloud that often covers the top of it, was "on" - apparently uncharacteristically for this time of year (summer).

there were practically no gaps in clouds when we were going up (we could see Cape Town when we started walking, but soon entered the tablecloth). There was one gap in the clouds when we were at the top, and everybody started taking pictures - of, as you can see, some generic bit of ocean with two white boats on it

Acrophobic entry

"I'm not afraid of heights, I'm afraid of depths. I'm not afraid of going up, I'm afraid of coming down"

dunno who said it but they are absolutely right

at wikipedia