This is hard work. Having set myself the challenge of doing a tree series I am struggling. I really am at my best with water. But the process teaches me two lessons to share. As an aspiring artist I do have to challenge myself and this series is one of those challenges. And yet as an inveterate hoarder, despite the fact that disk storage is so cheap, just looking at my tree photographs, I do know I have to do a lot of deleting. Whilst, as I have said earlier in this blog, one of the joys of digital is to be able to experiment and take lots of photographs; one of the challenges is in recognising those photographs that neither bring back strong memories of a happy event nor quite make the grade … and delete them.

This image comes from one of the worst holidays I have ever had. It was a walking holiday on the Greek island of Evia in September. OK, we were unlucky with the weather … Greece … September … should be glorious … it poured, and when it didn’t pour it deluged. Yet that was not the major problem … that was the holiday company, JustforYou (naming the guilty) with inept and drunken guides that took us on walks through back yards and rubbish tips and talked of local gossip rather than history and geography, and  a food budget they had cut so meanly so that the money given to the hotels and tavernas with which to feed us  (and it wasn’t a cheap holiday) that, rather than lovely Greek food we were offered such things chicken and chips, fish (dogfish ) and chips and a brown sloppy goop that purported to be moussaka, but wasn’t. The redeeming features were the other walkers, we had much fun and merriment laughing at adversity. Oh and one walk down a steeply wooded gorge was special, It had rained so much that I scarcely dared to get my SLR out of the rucksack; so this shot was taken on a very modest compact at the start of the walk. The rain had let up briefly and the sun was trying to shine through low cloud and mist. It failed eventually but the lighting was atmospheric and beautiful and I hope this image captures something of that day; a very wet Gaia indeed.