click photo to enlarge
Cameras are wonderful machines for recording the passage of time, though when I look at the way mine have documented my transformation from youthful lad to "getting on a bit" oldish bloke, I think they are perhaps a little too good at the task. My wife takes a set of about fifty photographs of our garden at the end of each month. By regularly looking through these groups of images she can track the changes over the year, decide what planting has worked and what hasn't, and make plans to remedy any areas that she thinks need attention. She did ask me if I'd do the photography for her, but I saw it as a boring chore, so the job has fallen to her! There's no doubting the value of it however.A few days ago I was selecting images for a talk that I'm giving shortly. It's about the photography that I've done in the village since I moved to it just over three years ago. One of the main points I'll be making and illustrating will be that photographing your immediate location at different times of day and year, in different lights and weathers, is a great way for a photographer to proceed and will invariably produce some of his or her best photographs. This is a theme I wrote about in the early days of PhotoReflect. One of the quotations I'll be using at the start of the talk is one that I used in that blog entry. It is by the contemporary U.S. photographer, Aaron Rose, and perfectly sums up the value of seeing the photographic possibilities in the mudane as well as the exotic - "In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary."
As I was selecting and rejecting images I came across a photograph I took this spring (in fact early May) of the fresh, lime green leaves of an ornamental acer tree that grows in my garden. It's a shot I like and I added it to the list for the talk. But then I started wondering what the acer looks like now, in mid-October. So, I went out and photographed it in all its autumnal beauty. I think I may add this one to the talk too.
photograph and text (c) T. Boughen
Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On
