click photo to enlarge
Simple pleasures are always, without exception, the best pleasures. Watching your children's first encounters with what we take for granted
is an experience that's hard to beat. I remember my first-born sitting in
his pushchair and laughing uncontrollably at a donkey, the first he'd ever seen, that put its head
through a fence to look at him. Simpler still, isn't a cool glass of water on a hot day a drink unsurpassed by any man-made mixture? Or what about the view at the end of a strenuous climb to the summit of a mountain? Isn't it just the perfect reward for your effort?And then there's clouds. I take almost daily pleasure in looking at clouds. Formations that I've seen countless times still attract my eye and instill the same awe that I must have felt the first time I saw them. New and different takes on common configurations also draw my attention. The other evening I was out and about looking for a few "lines in the landscape" to add to my collection. The tracks left by farm vehicles as they traverse crops have a fascination for me, and when I saw the examples in the photograph above I was pleased to see the clouds overhead. Those straight flicks of cirrus looked like they were painted on to the blue sky with a lightly laden brush. The effect of the wide angle lens at 17mm was to make them converge towards a vanishing point and introduced a linear quality that echoed the lines below. It was enough to make me take a shot that gives the sky more emphasis than the land below.
photograph and text © Tony Boughen
Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On
