Autumn Colors

The nature provides quite a few shades of yellow, red and green at this time of the year.

Hardanger

A great piece of scenery not far from the west coast of Norway, with deep fjords and high mountains. Besides the beautiful nature, Hardanger is also known for it's fruit cultivation, brought here by the Cistercian monks from Lyse Abbey - also called Saint Mary's Abbey, Lyse - in the middle age. Among the fruit they grow here, you find apples, pears, cherries, plums, etc.

Bubbles

Bubbles – always fascinating when shooting macros. It is a subject that can be re-visited again and again.

I have used a glass of water and some oil, approx 1 cm on top of the water, and then I stirred it . The different colors are a result of filters in front of the light source – an ordinary spotlight. In two of the red ones, a flashlight has been used as additional light source.

Note! This post has been copied from my previous blog at WordPress, originally posted May 28, 2012. The pictures may have been edited slightly different.

Lyse Abbey

Lyse Abbey, or Saint Mary’s Abbey, Lyse, was built in 1146 by monks from Fountains Abbey Yorkshire, England in 1146, and was in operation until 1536. This was the first Cistercian monastery in Norway. There were five Cistercian monasteries in Norway in the Middle Age – Hovedøya Abbey in the Oslo fjord, Tautra Abbey on the island Tautra outside Trondheim, Nonneseter Abbey in Bergen and Munkeby Abbey in Nord-Trøndelag.

The farmland on which the monastery was build, was a gift from gift from Sigurd, Bishop of Bergen. It became one of the largest goods in Norway, although not as large as the monastery outside Oslo. It was the monks from Lyse Abbey that brought fruit cultivation to Hardanger.

Today, it is of course only ruins left, but they draw a good picture of the size and architecture. In the centuries after the monastery closed, the stones from the monastery were reused in other places, such as the Rosenkrantz Tower in Bergen and Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, Denmark.

Note! This post has been copied from my previous blog at WordPress. Originally posted May 28, 2012

Mallards

The Mallard is a medium-sized waterfowl. It can grow 65cm long with a wingspan close to one meter, and weigh just above 1.5kg. The Mallard feed mainly on vegetable matter, but can also eat snails, beetles, worms, etc. In populated areas, when their access to plant matter is poor, they also eat bread fed to them by humans. You find Mallards on the Northern Hemisphere across the globe, and also in New Zealand and Southern Australia. They thrive in both fresh- and salt-water, but prefer water depths less than one metre. The mottled brow is the female bird.