Monday Mystery

Once again, on our mid morning walkabout yesterday, I spotted another painted stone. This time on a pile of roofing tiles next to an old outhouse being converted to a dwelling:



I may have missed others on previous walks so I have no idea how often they appear and still no idea whatsoever as to their purpose.  Intriguing though. Some days ago there was a piece of scrunched up paper in the tree fork where one stone had appeared in the past. It was awful weather that day so I didn't look closely at it. Maybe if I had I might have been somewhat wiser.

Shivery Sunday

Wordless Wednesday

Tuesday Teaser

Last week's Any Deepstyle modified photo was:



which started out as:



and was correctly identified by Adrian and Ragged Robin as the Union Flag aka Union Jack.

Here we are with yet another photo modified in Any Deepstyle:



What is it? If you think you know then you can leave your guess in the comments. They will be revealed, along with the original photo, next Tuesday.

Goodbye Leylandii - Part Three

It is fortunate there is a public footpath next to my garden as that gave the Green Cuts guys somewhere to drop a lot of the branches though it was still a tight space avoiding next door's fence and greenhouse. Nor was there much of a landing drop space in my garden between the fruit cage and the garden pond:

    

This view gives some idea of the task:


It wasn't until I had a closer look at some of the stills used to make the time-lapse I noticed that to be safe some of the cut branches had been lowered to the ground:



Some general shots of the guys at work:







 





Needless to say there was a veritable mountain of chippings to dispose of.
This truck ferried three loads on the first day alone:



Plenty of wood too thick for chipping, much of which some neighbours took for burning:



Originally I was going to have the stump taken down to about four feet in height but when it had reached this stage I decided I liked it as a natural sculpture to take the bareness off that corner of the garden:



So that was the end of two and a half days hard physical labour on their part.
All that remains is for me to pay the bill when it arrives.

Goodbye Leylandii - Part Two

A couple more videos today.
Most of the time I couldn't see any detailed action.
If your eyesight is sharp you may spot one of the gang from Green Cuts in the second section, would probably need to be seen full screen. It gives an idea of just how big the tree was.



In that and the following video the occasional sound of a camera shutter is from the 350D which was taking the stills which made up the time-lapse shown yesterday.

This is part of the final reduction from 60ft + down to a stump:



The gang from Green Cuts in Lincolnshire were terrific. I recommend them for the careful, stirling hard work they put in to the job and the way they cleaned up at the end of every day. You couldn't get a more cheerful, friendly gang to work for you.

A few stills to finish of tomorrow.

Goodbye Leylandii - Part One

There was a leylandii growing in the corner of my garden when I first moved here many, many moons ago. About twelve years ago I had it topped with about one third of its height being removed. After that it started to spread as well as finding new sections to continue its upward growth. The time had come to let some light in that part of the garden and relieve some of my anxiety when watching it wave and clatter in strong winds. To that end I contracted a local company, Green Cuts, to reduce it down to a stump.

For part one here is a time-lapse video of two and a half days hard graft:



I now have to sort out some real time video I took along with some still photos.

I had set up an old Canon 350D in the kitchen fitted with an 8GB card and connected it to a Canon mains unit which replaced the battery so I wouldn't have to worry about it running out of power. An external timer was set to take a photo every twenty seconds. The resulting 1866 photos were made, 100 at a time, into video clips using Time Lapse Assembler. This is a very simple app for the Mac though I don't know whether it will work with the latest version of OS X. Finally those video clips were put together in iMovie to produce the finished time-lapse.

Sound track is my own composition which I call Thumper.

If the video doesn't play here than this link should take you to it on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/TETmjK0R8RA