Day 21 - Reciprocal (give-and-take, resonance-with, interaction)
This morning - a cold, grey, overcast, drizzly day - I went outside to empty the kitchen compost caddy into the compost bin at the end of my back garden. The robin whose territory includes my garden immediately appeared to check out what was happening. As long as I kept my gaze averted, he was happy to be quite close to me; so I backed off, very slowly, to go and get my camera. I crept into the garden again, camera at the ready, and sat down near to where I'd previously been . . . and immediately he was there. If I feigned indifference, he came close; if I turned my gaze or the camera lens towards him, no matter how slowly and carefully, he instantly flitted off. So I had to make do with some (technically appalling) distant and murky shots in the poor light. In the last one, he was perched high up, singing his territory, but I didn't manage to catch him with his beak open.
Day 22 - Silence and Stillness
After yesterday's poor-quality photos of 'my' robin, and with today's prompt in mind, I thought I would stand very still at my open bedroom window, overlooking the garden, with a long lens at the ready, and wait patiently for the robin, or other birds, to appear. I waited . . . but was preempted by my neighbour's cat, perched on my fence, equally still and silent, but with nefarious purpose! In spite of my stealth, he sensed my presence and turned a baleful eye on me, doubtless because he thought that it was I who was frustrating him!
Day 23 - Contrast (edges and transitions)
I was really interested by this prompt. In ecological terms, edges - the junctions of different terrains - are biodiverse, rich in habitats and species. In permaculture design, the maximising of edges is one of the major considerations. One of my favourite local walks (which has appeared in images already in this sequence) is to a local green space - huge for the size of the small town that it's in - which is not quite a traditional urban park but nor is it a wild/natural space. It has trees, mown grass, long grass, hedgerows, a flowing stream, and a lake with a wide margin of bullrushes and other marginal plants. Over the years I have taken close-up photos of individual elements, panoramic shots, trees covered in hoar frost, or bursting into spring leaf, birds on the lake, and so on. Here is an image showing the lake edge and several of the ecological niches, now in their winter unclothed-ness.
Day 24 - Patterns
A behavioural pattern of mine is that I have around me, in my home, patterned items from the natural world that I see, and actively look at, as I go about normal life. These range from ancient fossils and rocks to just-cut fresh flowers. Below is an ancient/modern pair.
The fossil, on the left, is of a sea urchin, that I found on a beach when I was about six or seven years old and on holiday with my family. It somehow escaped my mother's rule that pebbles and shells from the beach may not be taken home at the end of a holiday. It somehow escaped my mother's habit of throwing things away, without consultation, if she decided that they were no longer desirable. It somehow survived my growing up, leaving the family home, being a student, making my own home, moving house several times . . . and it's still here. These are, I have more recently discovered, charismatic fossils, with a wealth of folklore attached to them. They have been found in significant numbers as grave goods in Neolithic tombs (see Kenneth McNamara, The Star-crossed Stone). I knew none of this, but nevertheless hung onto it.
The second image is of something much newer and much more fragile. It's the skeleton of a hydrangea bract, which emerged from last winter's leaf litter earlier this year. Already it's disintegrating - it won't endure long in my home as one of my companion objects.
Day 25 - Depth (distance, horizon, long view, high places)
My house stands in the bottom of a small valley and my views out are upwards to houses, trees and sky . . . no chance of a horizon. And I live in a lowland county, with only a very few not-very-high areas of 'high' ground. But even locally there are are relative humps and bumps, undulations in the landscape that enable a view. One of these is in my local park, which has featured several times in this project! This is the view from the top of the hill down to the lake, which is a natural dew-pond, originally dammed and managed by medieval monks to make a fish pond. I find this a very satisfying view and I see it as a tamed, miniature version of the landscape in which humanity evolved: I imagine that my ancient hominid brain reads this scene as open grassland, forest edge, and a good viewpoint from which to stalk any animals coming to the water-hole to drink. In the low light of winter, it was tricky (without a tripod) to get the small aperture, and thus depth of field, to convey the sense of today's prompt.
No comments:
Post a Comment