23. Photography Tuesday

I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was.  I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.  ~Wynn Bullock

When I go out with my camera, I rarely know what it is I want to photograph. I just take the camera whilst I go for a walk. That way, I keep an open heart and an open mind, and enjoy everything I see.

20. Bumblebees

The bumblebee lay on its back amongst the gravel of the dirt-track. Her little legs moved weakly as she tried to right herself. It was a sad sight. My friend gently picked her up and, with a tenderness I've rarely seen, brushed some of the dust off and gently tried to get her to feed from some heather. But, despite his best efforts, it looked like the bee was a goner. We left it on a flower, knowing that we did the best we could.

The bumblebee population, for reasons not entirely known, is on the decline, and not just in the UK but worldwide. There are many possible factors, including a loss of habitat, disease, the use of insecticides, and climate change, that have seen the populations plummet and could theoretically lead to a total loss by the year 2035.

11. Clinging on

The other day, we stopped off at a local nature reserve in order to find things to photograph. I was particularly interested in finding some damselflies or dragonflies. After much hunting, I finally found two tiny ones (one of which was above, although it moved off pretty soon after this was taken and I wasn't going to follow it through the marsh!).

Most kinds of photography require a degree of patience but I think that Macro-photography requires a special amount of it. It's hard work just focusing on something that small, let alone having to deal with whatever it is flying off and leaving you with nothing to photograph! But I think that's why I like it; it's an excuse to practise patience, which is never a bad thing.

9. Life on the Edge

We were on a photowalk last night, taking photographs in a field left to fallow, when I came across these little beetles. There were females, like the one above, heavily laden with eggs, and males that were wandering in search of the females. I've never seen such beautiful beetles before.

The thing is, the females were so heavy that, because they were often in precarious positions such as gripping onto the underside of leaves, they would sometimes lose grip and fall off with a tiny thud into the undergrowth. A life in macro, with no awareness of the hugeness of the world, that one tiny drop was probably like half a lifetime of falling...like a huge event for those tiny creatures.

I watched the beetles and thought about how each of us have our own little dramas with little grasp on how small they really are in the grand scheme of things. Like ranting at the person who has just cut you up on a roundabout (because it's such a big event, right?), or the argument you just had with your partner is like the end of the world as you know it. I'm as guilty as most people for making such small little molehills seem like mountains.

I love macro photography so much. It allows me to view the world in a completely different way. Sometimes, it's not just about seeing the grand scheme of things but also seeing that even the smallest thing can feel so huge.

8. Simplicity in a blank page

I've been working on breaking my writer's block once and for all. There are some dark forces afoot but I'm working my way through the murkiness, with thanks to Kirsty and her perfect understanding of an artist's mind, I might add.

Apparently, the above picture, which I took during a trip to Cardinham woods at the weekend, represents my life at the moment. There are two personalities in the picture: an old "me" and a new "me". The new one is growing strongly in the foreground but the old one has crossed its arms and isn't happy at being in the background (in other words: the old me is fighting the change). An interesting concept and quite accurate. I love how these things can be put into art to give it more meaning.

Anyway. Part of the writing work was to write about something; anything. Just so long as I wrote. And this is what I managed to achieve:

Blank Page
Blank pages frustrate me. It means that I have to force myself to think of words to fill the vacant lines, like I know anything in the world!
Blank pages whisper incriminations; they spike your nights with frustrated dreams. Grey lines - flat liners. No cadence, no rise and fall. Monotonous existence of a vast emptiness.
A blank page can bleed tears from stories never written. The empty space can warp perspective into a never-ending fear.
Then I must fill them - write something in the vacuum, my voice unheard unless I scream and then, still unheard.
I could lose myself in an empty page. My thoughts sucked out and absorbed into the fibres. The ink in the pen dries as the nib hovers above the paper. A wordless sight. Invisible.

2. The Details of Life

Life becomes jaded with our own preconceptions and habitual behaviour. Trapped in our own prison, we see things the way we have been programmed to see. Circumstances repeat themselves and we react with the same old patterns; arguments flare up over the same small issues and we still do not learn. But we can choose to change.

Hard work though it is, it is possible to retrain the mind to see things from a different perspective; to view the world with different eyes; reprogram ourselves to form positive mental pathways; to view the details of life and realise that they are merely the synopsis not the story itself.

"One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak". G.K. Chesterton.