This week The Gallery is back at Sticky Fingers, and the prompt is Body Parts. I’m back home for a few days and have spent the last hour talking a million miles a minute with her so I thought I’d include her in my photo for this week:

My hand is the smaller slightly crookedy one on the left.

What a fabulous prompt this week from Tara! I’ve had great fun going through my photos to find a suitably funny one.

This was taken at my uncle’s retirement party. He started work for his company as soon as he left the army in the 1970s and stayed there for almost 40 years before taking early retirement. He decided to have a 70’s themed party to mark his retirement, it was suggested that some of his colleagues had never left their beloved decade behind! It was a great night, everyone dressed up and really entered into the spirit of it. My uncle is on the right of the picture, Starsky and Hutch are being played by my cousin (Starsky) and his best mate (Hutch). At least I think that’s the right way round… I never can remember.

I haven’t taken part in The Gallery for a few weeks, but now I’m settling into my life as a student I thought I’d get involved again. This week’s prompt is The Colour Red, with or without a Halloween slant. I’ve chosen to go without the slant, and instead pick this picture.

This poppy field is about 5 minutes drive from my parents’ house. Every year it is a wonderful sight when the poppies all come into bloom, but this year was probably the best I can ever remember it being. It was covered on tv, radio and newspapers – at the weekends people were driving for an hour or more to visit it and take photographs. Out of all of the photos that I took I think this one is one of my favourites – I have a copy of it stuck to my noticeboard above me desk. I love poppies and looking at it every day makes me smile and think of home.

I’ve been far too complacent for the last couple of weeks when I’ve been seeing The Gallery prompts and this week it has come round and bit me in the behind! This week’s prompt is A Photo I’m Proud Of – it makes me want to go and hide under my very heavy quilt! I love to take photos and frequently end up taking copious amounts, but as soon as they’re uploaded I find myself zoning in on everything I did wrong with the photo and working out how I could take it better next time. I’m a real perfectionist – I’ve got to learn somehow!

I went to the BBC Summer Good Food Show back in June, it’s held jointly with the Gardeners’ World Show but the only part of that we visited was the flower tent. I’ve been trying to improve my nature photos so this was a great opportunity to take photos of beautiful flowers. This one is probably my favourite, and I’m definitely proud of it.

This week’s Gallery was another fairly easy one for me, I’m starting to worry about how hard the next hard prompt is going to be! A Memory was the prompt set by Tara and straight away I thought of this picture.

I spent a wonderful fortnight in New York with my brother a few years ago, this is him in Central Park. It’s not the best picture, it was taken on a 35mm camera and the photos were put onto cd badly by the company who processed the films. The memory though is vivid, my brother was obsessed at the time with Spongebob Squarepants and he was so excited by finding an ice cream version. It’s a picture I love looking back at, one of my absolute favourites.

This week Tara set the prompt of Playtime for The Gallery. Unlike a lot of bloggers who take part in The Gallery each week I’m not a parent, so I don’t have pictures of children playing, or ready made models for a new photo.

What do you get if you put two twenty-somethings in FAO Schwarz in Las Vegas? Playtime!

Perhaps not the most obvious of choices but I think it fits the prompt pretty well.

I love this week’s prompt from The Gallery, it is simply Nature. As a proud country girl I love the outdoors, living for five years whilst I did my first degree in a place where I couldn’t see trees and hills and green was an absolute nightmare. I take lots of photos of nature too, I recently found the box with all my old photo albums and they were filled with photos of Duke of Edinburgh expeditions and other outdoors pursuits.

It’s been tricky to pick a photo because I have so many to choose from, but this is the one I’ve gone with.

I went for a weekend in May a couple of years ago to Talybont in Gwynedd, Wales and spent a couple of wonderfully relaxing days with the sea on one side and the mountains of the Snowdonia national park on the other. It’s a very unpopulated area so the beaches looked as deserted as this pretty much all day long. It was bliss to sit in the early Welsh summer sun with a pile of books and magazines, just doing nothing.

I’ve really struggled with this week’s prompt for The Gallery. It is to pick a photo that represents a favourite book, novel or children’s tale. As soon as I read it my first thought was that the combination of books and photos was perfect for me, and then my brain went completely blank. Days later it’s still feeling pretty blank.

After lots of scouring of my photos I remembered this one:

Like lots of people I love the Harry Potter books and after seeing the trailer I thought the choice of the Millennium Bridge for the briefly mentioned bridge collapse in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was a great idea. The scene in the film was, for me, a little disappointing, but when I got by the bridge on a visit to The Globe my inner geek couldn’t resist taking a photo.

Great theme for The Gallery this week, a photo of something everyday taken in an unusual way. I had a few candidates for this, but most of theme failed on the everyday bit. Then I remembered this photo and thought it should be the one I chose:

So, can you see what it is yet?