Here is the place for discussion about fortnightly competition # 42 - Local Flora.

As is traditional I will stop looking in here once the first entry has been submitted.

Good luck,

Glyn

P.S. - Just the usual reminder that entries for this competition must be taken during the period of this competition (13th - 26th May) with a Pentax camera or Samsung DSLR equivalent. The competition will close at 6pm BST on 26th May 2010.

Here in the UK it is spring with an explosion of plant life although with the coldest May for many years it seems to be taking a while to get going.

However I do not want to exclude our international members so what I want to see in this competition are examples of some local plants or flowers that are obviously around at his time of year. I will be looking for something that has impact which could include close-up detail of an individual plant to broad landscapes.

I look forward to seeing your interpretations and hope that I can maintain the quality of judging so prevalent in these competitions.

Good luck,

Glyn

P.S. - Just the usual reminder that entries for this competition must be taken during the period of this competition (13th - 26th May) with a Pentax camera or Samsung DSLR equivalent. The competition will close at 6pm BST on 26th May 2010.

Gosh, what a surprise. Many thanks for my first place. One of the consequences of putting up a picture early, or as in this case first, in these competitions is that I always see later entries that I think are better. DrOrloff's bear was my favourite but then I come from a family of bear lovers .

I would also like to say that I thought the quality of all the comments was very good.

Congratulations to Kris & Dr.Mhun and everyone else for such a good set of very well implemented interpretations.

I'll give the next subject some thought and post something up later this morning.

Glyn

I have to agree. I worked for many years on some very hi-tech broadcast systems with a group of Dutch engineers and I have to say they were the nicest people I have ever had to work with.

Glyn

Thanks for the interest guys.

The whole collection is shown here:

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP4908-c1-vsmall.jpg[/IMG]

Those that remember the book will notice that several vehicles are missing.

There are also two tankers here. That is because I had not realised that there were two different cab designs which date from about the correct period. The first one I did, the earliest of the cab designs, was not the one portrayed in the book. A stupid mistake and somewhat worrying at the time as even in a very beat-up condition these still seem to fetch far too much and cost the most of any of the items in this collection.

Glyn

Most of my Dinky & Corgi collection was passed on to my brother but he still has one or two of my originals.

My other half, Jane, collects ladybird books and a few years ago we thought that for a talk she was giving on the subject we could try and put together some of the toys represented in the Tootles book.

It was a lot harder than I imagined. Buying pristine originals was beyond our budget. So I decided to obtain beaten up examples, that hopefully were of little interest to collectors, and restore them. I started with the ambulance which cost a few pence at a boot fair:

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP2547-c1-vsmall.jpg[/IMG]

and ended looking like this:

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP2644-c1-vsmall.jpg[/IMG].

Some vehicles were a lot harder. A few did not have any toy equivalents that we could find for around the date the book was first written. These included the road sweeper, ice cream van, steam roller and motorbike. These we decided to ignore.

Some vehicles were only partially based on available toys. For example the cattle truck had the chassis of a Dinky flat bed cement truck. For this and similarly the removal van, I scratch built the bodies, e.g. :

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP3296-vsmall.jpg[/IMG]

The project outlived its original objective but sort of ground to a halt a couple of years ago. We still have them on display in our living room next to Jane's cabinet of ladybird books.

So it was a nice opportunity to use a few of them for this competition.

Glyn

P.S. If you don't see three photos in this post they may, for some unknown reason have been blocked by AdBlock. (For me it blocked the picture of the before-ambulance). Try the Adblock setting "Disable on this page only" and they might appear.

I also have a Panasonic LX3 which I think is a fantastic little camera.

Glyn

I did think about it but he is not really my childhood memory.

He does look a lot nicer than me though .

Hipperty's carrots are up and while waiting for them to grow he is swatting up on some of our other seedlings. You can see the larger image here.

I do like your piggy bank image .

Glyn

Tootles the Taxi
[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP4897-c2small.jpg[/IMG]

I used to love this book. Now my Wife collects ladybird books and there turns out to be several versions of this title. This is an early, non pc version, that dates from my childhood with some of the dinky toys that inspired the artist.

K-7 with DA*16-50 @ 34mm
F22, 1.6sec & ISO 100

Taken on 30th April 2010 @ 17:55.

Glyn

Many thanks Stefan for your excellent judging and for such an interesting subject.

Thanks too for my "highly recommended". It was fun to do.

Congratulations to our winners, Elscotto, JudithAnn and Gareth. Congrats also to everyone else for all the well though out submissions.

Glyn

P.S. I use Firefox add-ons Exif & Exif Viewer to read the exif data in the forum based competition.