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...