Continuing my year of looking towards the heavens, I am quite quietly impressed with myself that I have completed another month of sky-pics and sky-thoughts. I have to confess that the thoughts are often after thoughts, written in catch-up mode…but the photographs are day by day. It is slowly becoming somewhere between and imperative and a habit.
It is becoming important this need to at least stand on the doorstep or at the window and capture a moment of sky. On days when I would rather stay home, this far outdoors, outward thinking if not venturing, I will do. "Will" being the operative word. I leave my camera in incongruous places to remind me, or reach for my phone if I've left the camera behind. I prefer my Canon Sureshot to be fair…I like the illusion of control it gives me…the knowledge that when I learn how to use it properly there will more creative options.
It is such a simple thing, to look at the sky, to capture that view…and yet, it is also an opening, an invitation to understand…to think about…to consider…to play.
Even without my camera, after I've done my photographic stint, or when acknowledging the dullness, or brightness, or otherness that I'm not inclined to capture…I still find I look up more than once I did. Not always to the sky, sometimes to the trees, or the buildings. I stand straighter and taller and realise how small I am. I look up.
I love the shapes I find, the shape-shifters. I love the light – and the dark.
And I am also intrigued by how our memories mis-play the passage of the month. February is a dull drear month than no-one loves, and yet as I look through, I find at least half the month showed skies at least partly bright and blue.
Some of my favourite February moments…..
Wards of winter stillness,
dwarfed by immensity,
tree sentinels on field edge,
on the edge of this home city.
Still the empty heavens,
blue paling in its earthward fall
to white light beyond the horizon…
"beyond" the eternal call.
Starburst of beauty, too bright
to watch,
captured blind;
picture this, who knows
what secrets inspiration hides?
Flying free means being able to be very small…not being fazed by the awesome power that surrounds us. Flying free means stretching our wings up into the shifting patterns of the sky, regardless.
An ink-swilled sunset, above the streets of the estate cut across by unsightly, necessary, cables, reminds me that we have to look beyond what is closest. "Look at the bigger picture" I'm often told, when I bemoan that folk won't focus on the necessary detail…but sometimes it's true. Sometimes the bigger picture is the one to hold on to.
What fascinates me as a novice photographer deliberately adopting a largely point & shoot method, is how often things look better in the shot than they did in life…and also (as here) how often the reverse is also true.
This looked like a star-burst to my naked eye, even though it's just sun behind cloud. Of course my vision isn't perfect…and maybe that's the point, perhaps sometimes we have to look at things with a flawed vision to see the beauty in them.
