…just maybe, some stuff about photography instead of a big old blank space. I’ve moved to a new town, and still no developing facilities and frankly, I’m happy to leave it to other people for now.
Instead, it is project time. Has taken a while to bring this together, but it is more or less there (as in the idea, not yet the full execution), and project means ‘theme, relevance and aspects’ rather than just ‘collection’. I think so far, it has mostly been ‘collection’. Anyway, this time I’m interested in how people see hills, even particular hills. And, estuaries. Got any hills or estuaries near you? Got any experiences you can tell me about? I promise not to say it was me.
I grew up near an estuary, and it took ages before the realisation of how much life was in it gradually dawned on me. Those hordes of different shorebirds feeding there, well everyone had that, didn’t they? Er, no, they didn’t. Can’t remember when, but there was a solar eclipse one day, maybe in the mid-nineties (I’ll look it up in a minute) and I went along the path by the estuary to see it. There were other people dotted about, but not that many at all. I sat there with my bike, and waited. It was like when you look and look for a change in something, and then decide that it will happen so slowly that you won’t notice it anyway so why bother, and soon I was thinking of something else when I noticed that the sounds had changed – all the birds which were usually rustling and plodding about in the mud, making their curlew and redshank calls, and ‘chattering’ away, were quietening. And then I could see, without looking up, that the light was seeping away, leaching out of the scene like water from sand, and that the contrast and brightness were fading out of everything. It could have been terrifying, perhaps before science (and maybe , centuries ago, before the papers and the news and the internet were a twinkle in some mogul’s eye.
And looking up you could then see that a perfectly concave section, a mathematical curve, was being steadily removed from the sun, until finally the darkness was momentarily complete, like a creation story re-enactment. I remember that the birds ‘woke up’, convinced it was the day starting again, and the twittering resumed.
Any hill or estuary moments to share? Big or small. I’d love to hear ‘em.
When I posted this long ago, someone said they felt that pinhole cams play with time, and made recent past look nostalgically like revered past. They implied that the technology does this, rather than the length of time itself. This is different again from recording the passage of time; it’s placing it in a context, which might be nothing to do with the actual time it was taken. f/1.4’s image seems to me to cover recent eras, but set in the future, and although it’s pinhole it doesn’t suggest distant past, which is in keeping with the meaning entirely (as I read it anyway). But unless he has a handy time machine which he is about to patent and become a squillionnaire, I’d say that’s not really the case. It’s carefully set up, carefully positioned.
So I did another run to try and refine the process a bit and get it further towards what I wanted, which was something a lot older and early photographic looking (surprise, I know). I wanted diffuse light and ‘depth of field’, something where the object mattered as much as the process to make the whole image, now I was better at home developing. Here’s the result.
