As I’ve said before, one thing I do love about London is the abundance of green space in which to sit and chill. Now that my exams are out of the way, and I’ve got just over a month’s holiday before I find out my degree result and start work, relaxing is one of the things I’m starting to excel at.

Yesterday’s weather was absolutely stunning, and my girlfriend dragged me to the park for a spot of sunbathing. (Just a note: I don’t tend to tan very much under factor 50, but then I do have fairly fair skin…) I can’t stand lying around for hours doing nothing, and it was a little bright – not a cloud in sight – to read my book without blinding myself. I did, of course, have my camera with me, so I fired off a few shots here and there.

This one shot – a crop from a wider view that including blurred people and a little sky at the top – is actually my current desktop background on my Mac. I upped the vibrance and saturation levels a bit in Lightroom to match not exactly what I saw when taking it, but more how I felt I was seeing it. In reality I think the grass was a little less green, but my memory of the scene is of bright sunshine and enjoying myself – so in that sense, I feel the edits make it realistic.

I’ve licensed the photo on Flickr under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, so feel free to use it on your own computers as a summery desktop background.

Going to university in central London, and it being both exam season and Spring, it’s only natural I should make use of the fantastic green spaces London has to offer. Off the top of my head, I can think of the major parks – Regent’s, Hyde, St. James, Kensington Gardens (part of Hyde Park, ok, fine!) – as well as the myriad squares in Bloomsbury, places a bit further afield like Clapham Common and that random bit near the London Eye.

Inside these spaces is a plentiful array of wildlife, and taking my camera along to a revision session in Regents Park the other day, I came across this little chap nibbling away next to the Broadwalk. Like most animals living among London’s 7 million human residents, he was pretty tame and didn’t mind me too much as I walked slowly around him to get a better shot. I ended up crouched about 1.5m away from him, leaning against a tree as he munched away on sycamore seeds.

It’s possibly a bit of an error to take my camera with me to what’s meant to be a revision session – but that didn’t quite matter on this one, as it ended up being a bit too windy to sit in the park too long…! I’ve got 3 exams left and then just over a month to do as I please before I start work – which will, of course, mean going out to fill my new 1TB hard drive full of photos