I'll start a photo blog, thought I. So - with my year's subscription due at Photoshelter, I changed my website to Pixpa - which is cheaper and has an integral blog. I decided to call my blog Through a Glass Damply because that's what landscape photography is like here in North Leitrim, in the beautiful, glorious and very wet North West of Ireland.
This first post features a few photos I made on Imbolc, which is also known as Candlemas. It happens on (or around) the second of February and is an ancient festival. It would have originally marked the arrival of the first lambs, which also meant milk available for vulnerable humans after the hunger of winter. It has come to mean the first whisper of Spring, here in Northern Europe: daffodils and snowdrops emerging, a tentative budding of willow and elder in my garden.
To celebrate the day I took the mad dog and camera to my local oak wood and made a few late afternoon images. When I came back down the hill, someone else had celebrated Imbolc - by lighting a candle in the largest old oak tree on our lane. A tiny flame in the growing dark, with a scatter of snow still on the grass.