Gallery: a July selection (2026)

Warm summer sun, shine kindly here

Mark Twain

Warm summer sun is definitely welcome, and we’re getting plenty of it in London this summer. No, actually what we are mostly getting is hot summer sun – very hot!

Two years ago I wrote a post for Sunday Stills on ‘the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer’. In it I was bemoaning the fact that summer seemed to have deserted the UK, moaning about ‘the chill and the rain’. What a contrast this year! London hasn’t seen any significant rain now for 42 days (and most parts none at all in that period). The temperature has swung between the high 20s centigrade (reasonably comfortable) to the low and even mid 30s (not so comfortable!)

Two years later and Anne has set a similar theme for this week’s Lens Artists challenge, Summer Daze. So I thought I would use my monthly round-up to share my July with her. This is how I’ve spent the most recent ‘summer days’.

This past month …

We haven’t been away at all in July but have been enjoying London life while trying to avoid the worst of the heat.

July and August are festival season in our local park. Ealing Council stage a series of them and we always go to a few. This month saw us at the beer festival and we’re looking forward to the blues one next month.

We had three cinema visits (cinemas are air conditioned here!):

• Shoot the People, an interesting documentary about the work of photographer and activist Misan Harriman (and Harriman was there to answer questions after the showing)

• The Invite, which I really liked

• The Odyssey, which almost lived up to the hype and was incredibly impressive in its scale and cinematography

Another treat was seeing Luminescence at Westminster Cathedral (not the Abbey – this is the city’s Roman Catholic cathedral). The light show was very effective, and I’ve included a couple of images below, but I’ll do a fuller post on this at a later date.

I went to a meeting of my photography group, mainly devoted to planning our forthcoming exhibition. Having volunteered to help with the curation I worked with two other members over a couple of sessions to make the final selection, decide on a hanging plan and finalise images to be sent to print. Not only was this interesting, I also got to know them much better over the odd glass of wine!

We had an interesting evening at the offices of expedition cruise specialists HX for a presentation, over wine and nibbles, about their trips to the Galápagos and Greenland. I’m trying to persuade my husband the latter would be fascinating and I think (hope!) he warmed to the idea a little. But (and don’t tell HX!) we would probably go with Quark having so enjoyed our Svalbard trip with them.

And there’s more …

A good friend of mine from my time working as a consultant was spending a few days in London with her husband, so we met up with them for drinks and dinner in a local pub garden.

On top of all that I continued to enjoy U3A activities such as table tennis, several learning groups and a visit to Regents Park, where my feature photo was taken. I’ll say more about that last one in a future Monday Walks post. And I also kept up with my aquarobics class, the cool of the water being very welcome.

I even found time for blogging!

Technical notes

Most of this month’s photos were taken on my phone but I took my new compact Lumix to Regents Park, on a walk in our local park and out into the garden for a couple of flower images.

As always most have been edited in Photoshop Elements and many also with Nik Color Efex. The final image was edited with Nik Silver Efex Pro.

And again as always, I’m linking my selection to Ju-Lyn’s and Brian’s Changing Seasons challenge, and to Natalie’s Monthly Wrap-up.

Please use the arrows to navigate the slideshow if you want to see all the images.

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