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Exploring

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography, Uncategorized on February 21, 2016| 2 Comments »

Since I moved to France sixteen months ago I’ve been settling in to a new rhythm of life, looking out onto vineyards every day and enjoying the slower pace of the Charentaise way of life. I haven’t travelled much apart from a few visits back to Scotland to see family and friends. Recently I decided it was now time to do a little exploring and I’d start with a road trip around some of France.

One of the first places I was drawn to was the Camargue to see the flamingos there. I don’t know if you are familiar with the idea of a “bucket list” but it involves having a list of all the things you’d like to do before you “kick the bucket” (check out the amusing movie, “Bucket List” for an entertaining take on this idea). I heartily recommend you put seeing flamingos on your bucket list. Wow! What incredible and beautiful creatures!

I took a lot of photographs. I mean a LOT. Here are just a few

sleeping on one leg

sleeping

making big

taking flight

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Likin’ lichen

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, Uncategorized on February 9, 2016| Leave a Comment »

lichen

Next time you are passing some lichen can I recommend you stop for a moment and take a look.

Isn’t it amazing? Sometimes the colours are subtle, sometimes striking – this particular yellow lichen makes all the more impact because of the blue sky behind it.

But look at the shapes too…..Nature’s art work.

Here are another couple I spotted recently

lichen spiral

lichen ear

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Nature’s colour palette

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on February 7, 2016| 1 Comment »

sky above

Sometimes the beauty of the sky straight above your head reminds you of something you saw earlier when you looked down at your feet….

crocus.jpg

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Dealing with obstacles

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on February 3, 2016| Leave a Comment »

obstacles

How do you deal with obstacles?

What do you do when you come up against the immovable? Push harder? Jump up and down? Scream and shout? Cry “unfair”?

What does a river do?

It flows around it.

But more than that, look, it creates beauty as it does it!

This photo is of the River Charente flowing through Jarnac. There’s a road bridge over the river and I was struck by the beauty of the patterns as the water flowed around one of the concrete pillars. I thought….there’s a lesson here…..

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Two kinds of attention

Posted in education, from the dark room, from the living room, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on February 1, 2016| 1 Comment »

Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, says we use our two cerebral hemispheres differently. The hemispheres, remember, control the opposite sides of the body, so the right control the left hand, and the left hemisphere control the right. It’s the same with vision where the right field of vision is the responsibility of the left hemisphere and the left field of the right hemisphere. I’m simplifying here, but you get the idea. In birds which have their eyes on the sides of their heads instead of in the front of their faces, each hemisphere controls the opposite eye but the idea is the same.

The right hemisphere supports a broad, vigilant attention. In a bird the left eye, therefore, is taking everything in to be aware of predators.

left eye

See how this duck is looking at me?

They use the left hemisphere to focus the right eye on details….for example, when picking out food.

right eye

There’s something else interesting about the field of view of interest to each hemisphere.

In we humans, the right hemisphere is more interested in what is far from us….

distance

while the left is more interested in what is close up….

catkins

 

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Seeing faces

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, Uncategorized on January 28, 2016| 1 Comment »

Have you ever noticed that we seem to be so well equipped with the ability to see faces that we can see faces where they don’t actually exist?

tree eye

I know this is a knot in a tree but I can’t escape the feeling that the tree is looking at me…..the Spirit of the forest?

And we don’t only see faces in living organisms, we see them in rocks too…..

rockface

There’s a Stone Age dolmen near where I live. It’s like a huge three-legged table with vertical stones each about 3 metres tall and a 5 ton enormous rock laid on top of them like a table top. I took a lot of photos when I went to explore it but this one particular shot looks for all the world like the profile of a face….perhaps in the same way that owners come to look like their dogs this rock reflects the face of one of the people who created the dolmen?

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As above so below

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography, Uncategorized on January 26, 2016| Leave a Comment »

skyvine

Not only was this an unusual cloud effect, but the way it echoed the vineyard below really caught my eye.

Of course, the vineyard is man-made, or at least man-cultivated, and the clouds, as far as we know, are not!

This kind of symmetry is my favourite kind….the kind where one part of reality echoes another.

There’s something else though about this image, or at least the taking of this image, and that’s the “exposure” readings for the vineyard and the sky. They were very, very different. With my camera I took a number of shots, exposing primarily for the sky, which darkened the vineyard considerably, exposing for the vineyard, which obliterated the cloud pattern in the sky, and a “weighted” exposure, which is the one you see here.

What strikes me about this is how when I just look at the same scene, without a camera, I don’t have any of those exposure problems. As I look at the vineyard and the clouds above I see them all perfectly clearly. I don’t have to choose.

How do our brains do that?

Isn’t something as everyday as vision just astonishing?

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Weather….passing by….

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on January 24, 2016| Leave a Comment »

weather passing

I saw some weather passing by the other evening.

When I zoomed in it looked even more spectacular –

weather window

….like looking through a small window – or even a letterbox!

There’s something very appealing about wind and rain and clouds and light all at once – particularly when you can see the whole weather system from a distance!

Why does it feel so great and cosy to be warm and comfortable inside your house while the rain hammers on the window, or the wind blows a gale outside? Is it the contrast? Whatever the reason, it seems to heighten the pleasure of being inside doesn’t it?

The other thing I like about seeing the weather passing by like this, is how transient it is. How brief it is. A few minutes later and this photograph would have been impossible. That’s one of the many things I enjoy about photography – the call to action! When you see whatever it is that catches you eye, there’s no point thinking “I’ll come back and take a photo of that some time” – it’ll be gone! You have to be present. You have to act. Now.

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The detail that fills the world

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on January 20, 2016| 4 Comments »

drops1

drops2

drops3.JPG

What catches your eye?

What do you notice when you look out of your window, or walk in the area where you live?

Attention is a complex phenomenon. It’s an interactive, dynamic process. What we pay attention to is partly influenced by our values, beliefs, preferences and prior experiences. Then once we pay attention to something, that attending to acts like a magnifier, increasing our awareness of whatever it is, filling more of our consciousness with it. And that, in turn, sets us up to notice more like that around us.

Water droplets sparkling on blades of grass, leaves and the petals of flowers, all catch my attention. I notice patches of shining water beads on the grass in the morning and as the sun moves across the sky the light “activates” the sparkles on different plants.

One thing I find really draws me into the present is to get up close and personal.

The particular is what absorbs me.

And having the intention to make some photographs somehow makes it even easier to slip into the details of what is right before me and helps me to fill my consciousness with the world around me, right here, right now.

Here are just a few photographs which I took of the water droplets on a single plant in the garden yesterday. Aren’t they glorious? Aren’t they absorbing? Don’t they draw your eye, and your attention right into them?

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The extraordinary in the ordinary

Posted in art, creativity, from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, photography, Uncategorized on January 18, 2016| Leave a Comment »

I do really love some of the larger Parisian galleries like the Musée d’Orsay, and the Louvre, but some of my most favourite ones are much smaller. The Rodin museum is a long time favourite of mine. I like it best when it’s warm enough to be able to stroll in the gardens there. It has that wonderful combination of Nature and Art which really encourages you to take your time and savour it.

On my last trip to Paris I found another smaller gallery, the Musée Jacquemart André. Look at the main foyer –

gallery

And the ceilings…..

ceiling.jpg

I went there to see an exhibition of portraits of the Medici from Florence, but the building itself entranced me.

Here’s one of the many things which caught my eye and surprised me, a wall covered with a tapestry which has had a door cut into it –

tapestry door

Maybe for the owners of this gallery, back when it was a private house, bought and used tapestries the way people use wallpaper nowadays, but they seem like such works of art to me that I was shocked to see a door cut into it. Then when I looked a little closer I noticed the door-handle!

doorhandle

I’m not sure what I think about that!

What do you think? Does this make art more utilitarian? Does it make the everyday practical more beautiful?

Whatever you think about it I think it’s a great example of the extraordinary in the ordinary….”l’émerveillement du quotidien”.

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