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The
promenade looks warm and sunny in this picture, but the camera could not
capture the biting, cold wind blasting across the beach. I was therefore surprised
to find these two pairs of bare legs on display, attached, I presumed, to covered bodies more
sensibly sheltering beneath the curve of the breakwater.
I wandered slowly round Teignmouth, catching light in my camera, playing with colours and exploring textures, thinking about how few elements in a simple picture it might take to convey the word “seaside”.
Downsizing has forced me to open box after box of Kodak photo CDs, from the days when I started having my black and white film scanned. A lot has happened to digital photography in five years. Anyway, I need to reduce the shelf space, so I’m going through them to see what needs to be transferred to a hard drive, and what can be binned.
I wrote here recently about finding an alternative viewpoint. Here’s an example. If you happen to find yourself in Pisa on a day filled with tourists, as did I in June 2003, you’ll see a completely chaotic crowd of holiday snappers, all taking more or less identical pictures of that famously inclined column.
The challenge for me was to come up with something different for my holiday snaps: I wanted to show something of the confusion of the time and place. Taxi!
External changes often affect the way we see things.
I’ve been looking at this delightfully quirky French Art Deco Stove every day for many years, thinking only about cleaning out the ash tray, or lighting a roaring fire in it.
Today, I saw the stove in a new light. Not the blatantly streaking shafts of sunshine, but in a “letting go” kind of way. The prospect of moving house, leaving this great little warmth giver behind, had caused me to see it very differently this morning.
Letting go? Only of glowing memories: my mother bought this stove, and my friend Pauline sent some new Mica once, all the way from America, when I needed to refurbish the cracked, flaking, tired translucent door panels.
Last week, after I got home from work, a milder day with late afternoon sunshine tempted me outside into the garden. I sat still, savouring a long drink of blackcurrant juice, blunting its sweet edge with a generous slice of fresh lemon, allowing the cares of the workplace to evapourate in their own good time.
As I tilted back my head to drain the last delicious purple drops, the amber sun shot straight through the patterns in the moulded glass tumbler, causing me to reach for my trusty pocket camera and remember what I love to do best: make pictures.
I often write here about how always carrying a camera dramatically increases the chances of catching a picture.
Yesterday evening, out of routine after a student music recital had happily delayed me, I'd left my jacket at work, with my point-and-shoot in the pocket. I’d also lent “big cam” to someone to try out. As soon as I saw the rapidly flooding road home, after only a day or so of rainfall, I wished I hadn’t.
No matter: I pressed my mobile phone into service. Any lens in a storm.
Preparing to move home into a much smaller property has involved Sparkly Jane and me in a great deal of ruthless cupboard tidying, trips to the local landfill site, donations to charity shops and a stimulating amount of finding elegant design solutions to maximise what storage space we shall have for that which we consider to be essential.
No thing is ever really indispensable: we are born naked and when we die we take nothing with us. In between times, we seem to acquire all manner of stuff.
A large collection of books needed some serious decisions last night. Hiding among the children’s section was a set of ten miniatures, each tiny tome measuring about three by two inches. They are illustrated stories from the Fairy Tales of Hans C. Anderson. I find them creepy in the extreme when read from an adult viewpoint. As a small boy I knew only the pleasure of devouring their colourful words. Here is one of them, complete with that infamous, saucer-eyed dog.
I grabbed a roll of curled up, green sugar paper, slapped this wee book on it next to a large window, then snapped it with my point-and-shoot, before advertising the complete collection for sale on eBay.
I’ve said it here before and I’ll be saying it again I’m sure: when something catches your eye, snap it, then find another point of view. the results are often worth that little extra effort.
I liked this chandelier in St Mary's Church, Tetbury, but I also wanted to show some of the delicate ceiling construction, abstracting the pattern from the pendant at the same time.
Practical advice: learn how to set the self-timer (shutter delay). It's so much easier to put the camera down flat on the floor, looking up, than grovel about on cold flagstones. Stand guard close by, just out of shot, to prevent the unwary making expensive blunders.
Anyone with a strongly visual imagination like mine would probably also get triggered by this collection of words to conjure up some kind of mythical, metal beast, with a rather odd collection of body parts.
I saw this abandoned hardware shop window down Devon way.
Regular readers will occasionally note my mentioning that, in my day job, I teach computers to blind and partially sighted children at a school for those with special educational needs. It's intensely demanding and challenging fayre. If those demands were the deep black night skies, the challenges would be as numerous as the stars. The rewards, when they come, and come they do, are like meteorites: rarer than the stars, but even more brilliant.
Here's what a gifted young trio has achieved this term, working as a team, producing and refining their ideas through intelligent discussion and debate, then pooling their design, journalistic and IT skills, all as part of their weekly lessons: it's their blog, called NewzForYou
Some of the students can only "see" the screen by listening to their computer speak to them, through an artificial voice, which is called a Screen Reader. Others make the best use of their low vision by employing software which magnifies the screen for them. In either case, they're the best touch typists you'll ever encounter.
The bit that "got" to me afterwards (and if I'm not tough with them, then I'm no help to them at all) was when they made sure I'd snapped a photo of them all with their eyes open, so they'd look OK in the picture. Some days are emotional roller-coaster rides.
There's something that fascinates me about the texture of flaking paint on old doors and windows.
