camera skills | snippetsandsnaps

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Raindrops. That looks like being the theme of the day when I set off, weatherproof jacket at the ready in case the cameras are in danger of getting wet. And it is, for a while, because droplets require the use of the old camera and its capacity for close-up. As soon as I contemplate a broader view, I hear a voice saying “Not CIM. You know better. Use your knowledge.” So I take a chaos of shots, twiddle a multitude of knobs, and select a bevy of options, to the point where I have no idea what new understanding took what photo. When I look at my collection of shots I find that I am in the middle of my Blue Period, although lacking Picasso's intentionality. At least now I know I need to make two different kinds of photographic excursions – one with an earnest notebook and pen, in the true spirit of skill development, and one with CIM frivolously engaged. Technique has interfered with the pleasures of the walk.

Which are many, beginning with raindrops on leaves. The bitumen only reaches a certain distance, as I expected, far enough to join the road that winds its way down the mountain: and then the combined road travels over a bridge near a cluster of houses, an old church, and a hut where I spent many evenings a lifetime ago. Droplets still draw my eye; and tiny purple pea flowers (blue with the learned camera); and the precariousness of trees whose roots are revealed in the cutaway earth; and the twistings of vines, and the framing of scenes (and a horse) by trees. The road in spots is paved with the round yellow balls of wattle blossom, and the long orangey needles of the casuarinas. The creek allows indulgence in old passions for reflections and ripples.