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Mutterings

These mutterings are more for me than for you, as I attempt to record what this picture and experience means to me and how I managed to make it.

I am not a wordy person, by that I mean that I find it almost impossible to express what I feel in words. I also do not really appreciate wordy art – some books move me and the words of Kahlil Gibran, especially ".. your shadow has been a light upon our faces" (impossible to show in an image!). Music, and especially Opera, move me and of course images, which is perhaps why photography is such an important hobby for me.

I always take my little camera on my morning walks, just in case I should see something a little bit special. On this particular morning, there was fairly heavy dew and misty air with the sun breaking through it. I first saw two rainbows – running in straight lines, for over a quarter of a mile - along the top of the dewy grass. Then I saw the corn webs.

My camera can capture an image in an instance and has a far better memory than I, but the picture is limited by the exposure, lens, aperture and focal point I use. Sometimes you can set these so that the resultant picture is faithful to what one saw. When I ‘capture’ an image in my mind, I have so much more information to store away – I not only have five senses, so for instance I can feel the moist chilly air, but I also have wonderment and imagination, especially where nature is concerned. What is it like for each spider living in their corn castle far above the ground? – and there were thousands of them, as every stalk had a web. This means that every time I make bread from flour, there is a minute piece of spiders web in it too!

So although I love photography, it can be a very stark plain medium to record nature. It just can not ‘see’ in the same way we can.

I had a cousin who was rather a good painter. He would go out and sketch a scene and then come back to his studio and ‘work up’ a picture from it and his memory. He would re-sketch it again and again, throwing away some beautiful drawing, until he was happy. He would then do the same with the painting. We have one of his ‘industrial rejects’ hanging on our walls, and to us it is perfect, but not to Shon – it was a canvas to throw out. What I perhaps now realise is that to tell a (factual) story in an image, be it a drawing, painting or photography, one must spend time recalling the memory and trying to express it to the viewer. He wasn’t re-doing things because he could not paint or draw, it was because what he had done did not express what he saw and what he wanted the viewer to experience.

I am now so lucky that in this new digital photographic world, non-artistic people, like me, can use a medium which does not require years of practice to master. We have a chance to show others what we saw – not exactly what the camera recorded.

This is the first image I have really "worked" to try and show the wonderful experience I had – I have attempted to make it more than just a ‘pretty’ picture – more than just tweaking a few curves or adding some sharpening.

So down to how things developed...