Photo Project Idea - Oddities

Not only in nature, but even in my house I sometimes come across oddities of natural nature or behavior. You know, the times that you say: 'Hey, that's an odd thing'.

Even dead flowers can be transformed into something else with a bit of imagination. I love to make those photos if I have the time and opportunity. Odd behavior is something you often see in animals. For some reason or other dogs and cats can develop an odd behavior.

The photo above looks like a plane crash, but it's not. It's a small old plane attached to a pole at a beach restaurant in Zantvoort in the Netherlands. I was standing high on the promenade and the beach was way below. Therefore this plane was on my eye level.

I raise sheep that belongs to an old and rare breed called Drenthe Heath Sheep and when they die or get slaughtered, I collect their skulls whenever I can.

Only today when I was taken photos of other things, I noticed these odd things inside the skull of an old ewe, which I never noticed before. As I am not a vet, I don't know the name of these parts in the nose, but I'm sure they have a name. I got attracted by the beauty of the filigree in the thin curled up bone. The reason I never noticed before is that she's missing some parts of the lower nose bone which normally covers the inside.

We have Giant Hogweed on our property and sometimes I take a flower and put it in a vase and then I forget all about it until it's time to do some cleaning up. I was just about to pull the dried out flower from the vase, when my hubby said: "Wait, look at it, it resembles and old lady in a white dress, you ought to take a picture".

So I put it aside and forgot all about it again, until now, when I came up with the idea of writing this article. Finally the 'old lady' got her picture taken and now I can put her to rest in the garbage bin.

When my dad passed away in 1984, we had to clear his atelier (my dad was an artist) and I found this little root of a plant sitting at a shelf. I know he brought that home from one of our vacations we always spent in France and I thought, well if you dad thought it worth to hang on to, I will continue doing that. I took it home and it found its own little corner in our house. I don't know what plant it is from, but that's not important. What is important is that my dad obviously saw some beauty in it.

There is this wonderful indoor/outdoor art gallery in Stekene, Belgium, not so far from where I live. It's called The Verbeke Foundation.

They started out as a private collection, which turned into the weirdest, but so beautiful indoor/outdoor collection of Art I've ever seen. You can spend a whole day there.

I took the photo of those cows, when I was visiting this gallery. The Cows were molded and build by the artist. They're life size and their skin was made of some kind of fabric. They looked very much like real cows.

My Blind cat Kyra has had odd eyes all her life. She was born blind and she learned her way around our house and the garden. She could go in and out by herself. At the end of her life both eyes turned white. She passed away at the age of 19 years old.

Ever so often things are not what they seem to be. At one time I had this habit to chew on some licorice and when I had to clean out my desk, I found this half chewed piece and was about to throw it away. But holding it in my hand and turning it around, made me grab my camera, set up a scene and started to make some pictures. The problem was that it could not stand on its own and I was looking for something to put it in, but all that I could find was a mushroom.

I cut off the stem and pushed the licorice into the mushroom. Of course it was in the middle of the night and so I only used a flashlight to get enough light to make a photo. I think I've taken over 30 photos and then got on with my photo editing program and this was the result. If you look at this picture, would you have thought instantly it was just a piece of licorice? I swear I've not done anything to it, I found it the way you see it now.

This is one of the definitions of the word oddity, but what does it actually mean. I know for instance that 'the quality of life' means that you should at least have no pain, that you can still do some things that interest you, but what do you have to do or have to comply with the quality of being odd.

English is not my native language, so maybe 'quality' in this case means something else than I thought. Is it maybe some kind of confirmation/proof that someone/something is called being odd?

Is it the right to be different than the usual? I don't know. I only know that when something/someone doesn't fit in the established pattern it/he/she is seen upon as being strange, weird or crazy.

The photo shows the legs/feet with the work shoes of my hubby. He got fed up with having to replace his shoe laces all the time, because they would break so easily. So once he ran out of shoe laces, he took some electric cord to do the job and he's very happy now, because it's been holding his shoes tight for ages. I thought it was a very clever solution, but now he has to explain to everybody why his shoes are tight with electrical cord.

Last year we got the swallows back in the sheep barn and I was so glad because they had been absent for many years. So I was very pleased to see them coming again this year. First one, then the other and they started to mend the old nest. But one day however, one disappeared and a few days later the other too. Don't know what happened.

Then one day, when I was busy in the barn, I noticed a bunch of hay sticking out of the nest and a few days later it got fuller and fuller. Someone had taken over and it appeared to be the tiny wrens.

I know that wrens build multiple nests before choosing one to lay their eggs in, but I had never seen before that they confiscated another bird's nest. I stayed away from the stable for some time, in order to not to disturb them. I don't know if they laid eggs in it at all, but I took the photo anyway, because I just thought it was funny. Wrens nest in the weirdest places though.