Available Light

I have it on good authority that these flowers are primulas. They're actually very small. I was taken with their audacious colors.  Two young fish are swimming happily along when they pass an old fish. "Good morning," says the old fish, "lovely water today, isn't it?" Once the old fish was well out of earshot one young fish turns to the other and asks, "what the heck is water?"  **** There's a change which happens to every photographer at some stage. They begin to see light. Before that they see objects - people or hills or bees or birds -that are potential subject matter, and of course they still do that, but there is something else as well. They see the light: its direction and strength; its colour; whether it is direct or reflected or refracted or absorbed; the way it takes on the characteristics of whatever it has bounced off. They notice that when hitting film or a photographic sensor, reflected light  behaves differently than di...

Jesus said look again. The Kingdom of God is as close to you as your own hand. God is never absent and never far away. What stops us seeing and living in the Kingdom is us. We see what we are habituated to see, and the effort required to get out of our own way is too much for most of us to bother with. So God's call to us is to want to see, and to give consent to Gods action in removing our preconceptions. Easily said, I know. The way past our own inner filters is to be still. To let the constant parade of our ideas and memories and emotions gradually settle, and for a brief time to be present to this elegant, bewildering, complex, overwhelmingly beautiful universe.  Photo: Clemency has roses growing around her vegetable plot, and this is one of them. I took this with a Nikon D750 and a Micro Nikkor 105/2.8. F8 to give a reasonable depth of field but not so much as to bring the background into focus, iso 200 to give as little noise as possible and 1/800 sec to make the numbe...

We've been away for a few days. It's time to have a look at what's been happening, or not, in our absence. The dahlias are out.  And so are the hydrangeas .   The kids gave us a garden seat for Christmas, so I assembled it. It has a plaque on it, with a couple of lines from David Whyte's The House of Belonging. this is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love.    

It rained last night. The roses sustained a bit of damage, but they're tough little blighters. They still managed to put a brave face on things for us when we took our coffee and went out to pay our respects. There is an impossibly gaudy lily at the bottom of the garden, near the fence. Apart from trimming off some excess, these are unretouched. They do look like this. I'm not even sure what these things are called. They grow in the shady places and I'm told, on very good authority that they're special. It's an acquired taste, obviously, but I think I may be starting to grasp their art deco appeal. The flowers are nothing without the green bits. These little guys keep the gaudy bits alive. Keep you and me alive, actually. And when I look closely, each one is a masterpiece of beauty and complexity and elegance.

It's hard to take photos of flowers because it is so easy. You don't need particularly fancy equipment, and anyone can do it: just find a pretty flower, let it fill the viewfinder and press the shutter button, and there you have it. Another flower photo, pretty much indistinguishable from the other 10 billion  flower photos taken on the planet today. Flowers are like sunsets, in that the subject matter does all the work for you, and you can get a shot you're kinda proud of without having to know much about what you're doing. But because there's so many flower pix and so many sunsets and because they all look the same, most fail to convey the wonder and beauty and subtlety and colour and detail which made you reach for your camera in the first place. You hope for a masterpiece and end up with a cliche. We are surrounded by flowers. Our garden had 39 rose bushes last time I counted and I've planted another 3 or 4 since then. I think there's a couple of do...

This week past was back to future, doing what has occupied me for years: sitting in an airport lounge or on a plane; going somewhere in a rental car; arriving at a venue and finding my way to where I'm supposed to be going; fiddling with the AV equipment which never, but never quite works; talking to people and pointing at stuff with the little laser and listening to the questions; staying in someone else's house and being part of their routines and sitting around on their furniture. It's all very stimulating and I really do love it. But to be back, and to be met at the airport by the one person on the planet who truly knows me, and then come back to the patterns which frame my days, is the deepest kind of relaxation, even when those days are full and energetic. So I wake, sit on my stool, chop wood for an hour, shower, make coffee, and go and sit in that place in the garden which we know will be out of the breeze today. The bumble bees are awake. The sun shines warmly...

I have a bag full of lenses and know perfectly well which one to use for which purpose, but sometimes it's important to break the rules. Sometimes I like to go outside with only one lens, knowing that the choice will restrict what I see, and the restriction will force me to see differently. So this picture was made with a wide angle lens, precisely what you don't use for flowers, and I quite like it because of that.  In a creative writing class I once took, an exercise was to write a short story with certain self imposed restrictions: in my case it was that the story would be exactly 1000 words long; Contain a discovery that leads to conflict; Mention 7 objects that all start with 'S' - (I chose sleeping bag, soap, sack, satin ribbon, stove, saucepan and soup); Have a question in every piece of dialogue; Mention every colour of the rainbow plus black and white, once and only once. The result is here . The point of the exercise is not to produce great lite...

 I live with a woman whose happy place is the 1350 square metres surrounding our house, and she's very often happy. When required I saw off branches and dig holes and move stuff around in the wheelbarrow but mostly, my role is to be the audience. It's what we do before breakfast, with coffee, when even in November there is a dew and you can see traces of your breath in the clear, early air. Bring your camera, she says. Look at this. Quick, over here, this is special. A bellbird proclaims his dominion and her friend the blackbird is loitering, hoping she may be doing something with the worm laden compost. The vegetables are coming along nicely. The wisteria is in bloom. How did this happen? How did we end up here? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Photos: Nikon D7100, Micro Nikkor 105mm 2.8