Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn. ~Elizabeth Lawrence
Autumn afternoon
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Tag Archives: photograph
Autumn suspended
I am typing this sitting at college with the sun blazing through azure skies that one would normally expect to see in Summer, on a less contrary island. On mornings like this it seems as if Autumn has been suspended. The leaves tell a different story, however.
The first of a series of Autumnal images.
Alight
Fresh off the presses, a tiny white moth fluttering on a grass stem in my garden this morning.
Lighthouse to nowhere
A shot from our trip to Nantucket in August 2011. The guidebook advertised this lighthouse as perched precariously on the cliff edge. ‘Photo op!’, thought I and dragged the family out there only to find that it had been moved! It is now situated in some fairly uninspiring and very safe scrub. At least the sky was interesting enough to make it worth converting this shot to black and white, pushing the blues towards black and the vegetation towards white to create a pseudo-infrared effect.
Mystery river fly
I found this beautiful creature sheltering from the rain under one of the curlicues of our wrought-iron gate. It is some sort of river fly but I haven’t conclusively identified it more specifically. Any river fly experts out there? It has two long tails, unlike the common mayfly which has three, and apparently only one pair of wings. I found it nowhere near a river so I an guessing it is one of the river flies that will inhabit standing water. Anyway, whatever it is, it’s a beauty! Here’s a close-up:
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns
… For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things…
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798), ll.88-102
Basking wasp
A wasp, glimpsed through the Autumn foliage of a sumach tree, basks in the last rays of the setting sun.
Last light at Kimmeridge
Another photo from my evening shoot at Kimmeridge Bay last month. The iconic landmark on the headland is Clavell’s Tower.
Built in 1830 by Reverend Clavell as an observatory and folly, the tower has inspired writers ever since. Thomas Hardy took his sweetheart, Eliza Nicholl, to the tower and included an illustration of it in his Wessex Poems. It was also the inspiration for P. D. James’s novel, The Black Tower and was used as a location in the television adaptation of the story. Moreover, it appeared in the music video for The Style Council’s single, ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’.
Between 2006 and 2008 the whole tower was painstakingly moved, stone by stone, 25 metres inland to save it from cliff erosion that threatened to send it crashing into the Bay. It is now operated as a holiday let by The Landmark Trust.
Yellow field before the storm
Many of my images are inspired by paintings. I think the same basic compositions work in both mediums. In this image I was inspired by the watercolours of Michael Morgan RI, an artist whose work I greatly enjoy. I was recently lucky enough to acquire two of his originals which, together with one of his limited edition prints now provide permanent inspiration on my walls.
Which artists inspire you? Feel free to post examples of your work below. I find the crossover between genres interesting and would love to see what influences my fellow photographers!
Into the mist
This is another photograph I took at Kimmeridge on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, one of the UK’s ‘honeypot’ landscape photography locations. In the absence of Kimmeridge’s famed sunsets, I aimed to make the most of the rock formations in this composition.
Focused Moments 