So yet another week of trying to make a silk purse from sow’s ear. If this sounds like last week’s introduction, it is–because there was no difference between those two weeks. The only difference between the third and fourth weeks of confinement was that in the fourth week we had 4 instead of 5 working days because of Good Friday, but in these days of working at home it makes little difference. So another set of photos from home and from the short walks that I am able to take.
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A symbol of the times:
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Every day when I walk down the street to the bakery, I look longingly towards the mountains where I cycled several times a week until everything ended in mid-March:
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Local fauna:
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Our local bakery, 200 meters from my house:
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Another day, same place. There is a customer inside the bakery, so the old woman waits outside:
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This dog’s human is the customer inside the bakery:
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Finally, it is the old lady’s turn. In normal times there would be tables both inside and outside the bakery, with 2-3 employees working the bread counter and serving coffee and toast to the customers who come here to eat breakfast. But these are not normal times, there is no table service, and one person is enough to take of the business:
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One of my rare outings by car, to the Carrefour supermarket. Some of the parking spaces normally reserved for disabled customers have now been repainted from the usual blue to red and are reserved for health workers:
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I spend more time in the garden now than ever before. I am not a garden person, and flower photography is not my preferred genre, but I try to find interesting things to look at, or I try out different techniques, for example using my 90mm Leica Tele-Elmarit lens from the 1970s on my modern Panasonic GX80 camera. This was the combination used for this image of some fruits on which birds have feasted:
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The same combination was used for this photo of large leaves:
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My late mother’s cactus looks like it is thinking of producing a new batch of flowers:
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I have no idea what these flowers are called; I refer to them as “mini-sausages”:
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A flower emerges in our palm tree. Within days it will lose its colour and become a pale, dry white bunch of little balls:
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When the sun is out, I take out my 12-year old Leica M8 for a spin of infrared photography, with a 715 Heliopan filter. These are plants in my garden:
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Our palm tree:
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Our neighbour’s garden:
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Our house:
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Our street, looking away from the beach:
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One of my morning walks, looking longingly towards the sea:
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Our local supermarket, people queuing outside–the number of people allowed inside at any one time is limited:
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The cats have plenty of space to roam around:
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And they still get fed–putting out food for cats is one of the permitted activities during the lockdown:
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This one was a bit wary of me:
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This one was completely nonchalant:
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The playgrounds are empty, but not completely empty:
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And we continued cooking in our luxury prison. I tend to make specific recipes, while my wife just concocts things, like this dish of angler fish with shrimp, potatoes, green beans, egg and other good things:
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And some evenings we play Scrabble, using a very well-used set that we have had for many years and have often used on the beach in happier times:
