A new year, yet another new start

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Rachael

When I first started this blog, back in April 2012, I had a particular reason. An injury meant that I was not able to get out with my camera to make new images. Blogging gave me an outlet for my frustrated creativity and a new lease of life for images I had already taken. Nearly 4 years later and the injury is still troublesome, but I have learned to live with it. The brain is amazingly good at learning to live with things, even pain. The problem no longer stops me doing what I want and what I want hasn’t changed – I still love (am obsessed with) photography.

‘Five’: Venice

As I slowly returned to making new images, this blog became more and more sporadic. In the end, I will always choose to go out with my camera rather than spend time at the computer. That is not going to change, but I would like to see if I can combine the two more effectively. So I have signed up for Blogging 101 with good intentions.

Still morning, Hamnøya, Lofoten Islands

Perhaps paradoxically, since starting a photography blog, I have obtained a Masters Degree in Victorian Literature and Art from the University of London. Yes, I like to read and write! Accordingly, I never intended Focused Moments to be a picture-of-the-day kind of blog. (Nothing wrong with those, by the way, just not what I intended.) Looking back at the early days, I see the posts that were most enthusiastically received usually had plenty of words as well as images. A good example is my article about the relationship between photography and mindfulness. So I plan to make time for more posts like that. I am also interested in exploring how the literature I enjoy and have studied may influence the images I make.

Tempest

Standard blogging advice is to write about oneself, to ‘make it personal’. I am not so sure about that. I am quite a private person and this is a public blog. The images will always be the heart of Focused Moments; I hope they are more interesting than me! Nonetheless, there are aspects of my photographic life that might merit more exploration. I enjoy exhibiting and have already written about some of my experiences in that area. Some readers want to know more about other things, my role as a camera club judge, for example, or what it is like to lead photography workshops. More on those, and other ‘stories’, will follow.

Frost on the Wey

2015 was an epic year for me photographically. I hope that 2016 will be equally exciting and, if any of you share at least part of the adventure with me here at Focused Moments, this blog will have succeeded. It is up to me, now, to make it worth your time.

Aurora over Skagsanden

Turbulence

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Rachael

200mm, f4.5, 0.6″

I am currently working on a presentation that I have agreed to give at a group exhibition in Lyme Regis later this month. The topic is the coast. I thought I might share ideas here as I go. I have always had an ambivalent relationship with the sea. I was brought up in a seafaring family and a large chunk of the first eleven years of my life was spent at sea. Unfortunately, I never got over my chronic sea sickness. Without wanting to labour the point, this meant that I spent quite a lot of time staring over the side of the boat! I have found the sea’s motion fascinating ever since (but I still prefer to observe it from the shore).

200mm, f/16, 1/40

‘Dark-heaving – boundless, endless, and sublime,

The image of eternity.’

– Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Music 101

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Rachael

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
― Aldous Huxley

Today’s Writing 101 prompt is to write about the three most important songs in your life. Well, true to my track record so far, I am not going to do that! For one thing, I find it impossible to choose just three songs. But I will say something about music more generally. Music is a big part of our family life. Both my children play piano to a high standard and they each have a second instrument, trumpet for my son and clarinet for my daughter. (She also plays the didgeridoo!) My daughter composes and recently she and a friend won a contest with a song they wrote and performed.

Not surprisingly for a photographer, I am a very visual person. I have no musical talent whatsoever but have often thought that of all creative endeavours, music is one of the most powerful in its ability to affect one on a visceral level. Darwin argued that music came before speech, and that feels right to me.

Now that I have two myself, I have been reminded that teenagers need music with the urgency of a biological imperative. Separate them from it for too long (say, more than five minutes) and they become quite incapable of coherent function. How and why, as we age, we become less dependent on music is beyond my ken. But when I rehear an old favourite song, after a long absence, I realise that music can still move me. It has the power more than any other thing to cut through the baggage of adult life and remind me what it was like to be that essential, earthy thing that is a teenager. I hope it always will.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
― Maya Angelou

That lighthouse, again and again

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Rachael

I recently had to give an interview in which I was asked to name my favourite landscape location. I found it difficult to answer as I tend to be focused on wherever I am with my camera at any given moment. However, one place popped into my head unbidden. Anyone who has been around here long enough will not be surprised that I thought of La Corbière.

Guarding the extreme Western edge of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands, this lighthouse has well and truly captured my imagination.

We have been to Jersey three times during the last two years and during each visit I have devoted evenings to this one place. There is something about the way the lonely, white lighthouse sits out at sea, precariously perched on Jersey’s characteristic red rock, that stirs the soul.

It has so many moods. Sometimes, it is wild and windswept, spray beaten and inaccessible. At others it is almost serene, especially at low tide when reflected in the still pool at its base.

On one occasion, during my only Autumnal visit so far, low clouds dispersed the setting sun, crowning the lighthouse with rays.

For the photographer, La Corbière offers so many possibilities. When the tide is out, a causeway is revealed, making perfect lead-in lines. Interesting rocks and pools create endless compositional opportunities and ensure that even if there are other photographers about, there’s plenty of space for everyone.

When the tide is in, higher and wider views can be had from the cliff top. Even in high summer, there is a good chance of having the lighthouse to oneself, or perhaps just sharing it with one other photographer and maybe a romantic couple watching the sunset.

There is one mood I have yet to witness, however. Each time we have been there, the weather has been fairly mild. I have yet to see the lighthouse brave a proper storm. To capture a mighty wave crashing over the tower would really be something. I will just have to keep going back!

A beginning

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Rachael

In a rash moment I recently signed up for WordPress’s Writing 101. Writing, on a photography blog? Yes, I did wonder if I knew what I was doing. I suppose I wanted to get back to why I started this blog in the first place. It wasn’t just to share photographs; I had Flickr and 500px for that. When I started Focused Moments, back in April 2012, I was in the middle of my MA. Perhaps the blog was a way of creating my own original(ish) content when I was otherwise immersed in other people’s words. (As my subject was Victorian Literature, there were a great many words!)

Over time, however, Focused Moments inexorably tended towards a photo-a-day kind of blog. Before more touchy readers protest, I am not suggesting for a moment that there is anything wrong with that sort of blog, just that it’s not what I intended. With Writing 101, which began yesterday, there are daily prompts. The first one was to free write for 20 minutes. Well, I didn’t feel like free writing about photography. That prompt seems, to me, more appropriate to the creation of fiction. So I have taken comfort in the challenge’s statement that we can be as free as we like in our interpretation of each prompt, and I have ignored it completely! Instead, I have thought about beginnings.

It must be fairly obvious to anyone who is kind enough to stop by here from time to time that I like landscape photography. For me, setting up somewhere and waiting for the light is a beautiful, and healing experience. But I am not really a morning person, so most of my imagery is made at the end of the day. However, last Friday Pete and I managed to get up for dawn. At this time of year and at these latitudes, that is no mean feat. Our alarms went off at 4am, and I can tell you that, as we were blearily dressing and mainlining caffeine, the planned adventure suddenly seemed far less appealing.

Once we were outside, however, all that changed. There wasn’t much of a sunrise, but it didn’t matter. We had the beach to ourselves. A hush hung over the morning, broken only by the swoosh of the waves and the haunting cry of oyster catchers. Homer’s ‘rosy fingered dawn’ delicately coloured the sky as a solitary fishing smack chugged out of the bay. I could understand why many landscape photographers prefer this subtle time of day to the more spectacular sunset. As my children grow, and need me less, one small but significant compensation is that opportunities to get out for daybreak will grow. The beginning of a new phase in life will involve seeing more of the beginning of each new day. There’s a certain poetry in that.

To have made a beginning is half of the business.

-Horace

The child of the morning, rosy-fingered dawn, appeared.

-Homer

Focused Moments

A professional photographer's life

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