Wide Wednesday: "Earth"

I'm hoping that this can just about fit into Bobsblips's Widwed challenge this week (hosted by steveng) on the topic of "Earth", as it shows what the earth's weather can do when it gets cold - and shows a fault in the earth's surface which has resulted in the waterfall.

I was a little cross with myself this morning as I didn't take my camera when I went out for a doctor's checkup, not expecting to have a chance to take my blip. I don't know why I didn't think of this before I left home, but I was able to include a walk through Jesmond Dene on my return journey - and the snow-covered scenery was superb.

Anyway, this gave me the interesting opportunity to see what I could achieve with just the camera on my cheap Android phone. So when I took this shot of the waterfall I actually took 4 separate shots (in RAW), bracketing the exposure to cope with the wide brightness range. I wasn't sure if I'd managed to hold the camera still enough between shots but the "HDR merge" feature in Lightroom coped well with it. However although the sky had been blue earlier, it was cloudy by the time I reached the waterfall and the featureless cloud at the top was boring. Once more technology came to the rescue in the form of Photoshop's new(ish) sky replacement feature which did a good job of inserting just a little cloud detail, from a shot I'd taken early this morning, into the bit of sky. Ain't technology marvellous?

The extra is a straight shot along the track by the Ouseburn in the Dene, I liked the perspective in that view.

Talking about technology, I'm sure we all feel impressed - and grateful - to the boffins who've developed the Covid vaccines so quickly. I know there are potential problems with variant strains (as there have always been with flu) but they've done an amazing job. And my Editor and I felt really lucky when we had a phone call from our GP surgery on Monday offering us our first vaccination appointment for this afternoon - and we're still almost 2 years off 70 so we'd not expected to get it yet. The vaccine centre we were allocated to was very well organised indeed, we were dealt with very promptly and (fingers crossed) as I write this, 7 hours post-jab, there's no ill effects as yet - not even a sore arm. (It was the Oxford/Astra-Zeneca jab). So now we've to wait 12 weeks to be called or our boosters.