Light and shade

Three benches

The weather pattern this year seems to be a repeat of last year: a wetter than usual May has left surface water all over the fields which surround my home. The car park at Eckington Bridge was under water again last week.

It’s scary echo: an extremely  wet May preceded the floods last summer, precipitating misery from which many people are still recovering. Repairs to damaged homes are still incomplete. Nerves are frayed.

Summer? That's merely a word, one which appears to be changing its meaning.

Chrome

Occasionally, taking a risk with a pocket camera pays off in the form of an unusual picture. Playing such games in a public wash room hones one’s sense of timing to a very fine edge indeed, believe you me.

I’ve been fascinated by odd reflections for about as long as I’ve been studying light. There’s a website dedicated to this kind of photography: The Mirror Project. It has accepted a few of my submissions along the way.

Reflecting

This is typical of the kind of complex image I love to capture. The fascination for me is in the variety of ways in which light behaves: refraction, reflection and transmission to name but three scientific terms for this most mercurial and enigmatic of physical energies. A simple piece of curved glass in a bookshop window, here behaving as a wide angle mirror, showing Ludlow architecture, yet simultaneously allowing through a glimpse of the interior display lighting and some of the stock items.

I thought more deeply about this picture after I read a poem last week, written by one of the blind children I teach. I had also just helped another compose an e-mail home. One boy was imagining, the other dreaming. Both were questioning what it must be like to be able to see.

The frustrating irony of it for me as a photographer is that I can't ever share with these students my impressions of light. I can only dimly hint at the sense of sight, inadequately, by using words. It's like trying to show a two-dimensional being (who lives in Flatland) the solid volume of a sphere. The discussion would be limited to what they could perceive purely as a shape called a circle.