Yesterday, during a break in the rain, I grabbed my hobbling stick, picked up my camera and stuck in what I thought was a clean compact flash card, and wandered off to commune with nature.

As I write this my mind is wandering about and also reversing back to less technologically complex days. Days when floppy discs with 1 Megabyte capacity ruled the storage roost! Remember these:

I still have a bunch of these together with the drive to read/write them. J is always asking questions that begin with – ‘When was the last time you used it?’ I mean, what’s that got to do with it? It works, so I’m not getting rid of it! The fact that my camera couldn’t take a single digital image that would fit on a minimum of four floppy discs is neither here nor there.

Anyway, back to relative modernity – the compact flash card I’d put in has 16 Gigabytes (16 thousand Megabytes) capacity (they go up to 1 Terabyte, 1 trillion bytes, these days) which is plenty for an amateur like me.

If you recall a blog post from years ago, ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop!‘ you’ll know that I probably get more fun out of messing about with/modifying stuff than actually using it to take photos. This actually accounts for the abysmal quality of the finished products which involve some grasp of exposure, shutter speed, etc! It also means that after taking some photos I generally forget about them until I stumble upon them a few years later, which is what had happened when, after yesterday’s wander, I actually got around to taking a peek at what was on the card – what a surprise (or not)!

In these dire times as such freedoms as we might have thought we had disappear down the Covid black hole here are some images that just might brighten your day. There is no particular theme or time of year, they range from dragonflies to orchids to Gülay, Suat and their family on holiday with us at the cabin to our neighbour building her summer shelter – anemone blanda to anemone coronaria to a beautiful endemic iris whose name I forget. If any of them lighten your day then job done!

Keep on truckin’ – Alan in Okçular