We had a thunderstorm today, with violent rain. As part of my “Stop to observe life” campaign, I wrote some notes whilst sitting at the back door. Here is an extract:
The patio is a frenzy of flickering circles where the drops spatter, percuss outwards and vanish. Rain scurries down in lines against the dark background of the fir tree. Lightning tremors and thunder rumbles like boulders tipped down a cliff. Water plitter-platters down from the leaking gutter. Leaves twitch and drip. Droplets tap on the window, nudge into each other, then streak down leaving a dissolving trail of water. I open the door and close my eyes. The air is cool, damp and roaring, like I’m standing next to a waterfall. Suddenly the sun emerges through the rain, and the droplets on the pine cones glimmer. The shadow of a bird crosses the lawn. The rain stills and the droplets shimmer down from the fir tree, iridescent like tinsel. As things quieten, I hear the washing machine whirr and clunk, and the downspout, which was blurting out water in spasms, now trickles a caressing lilt, like it was singing someone to sleep but couldn’t speak words. The leaves waver peacefully and a blackbird whistles and chirrups like a woodcut maker chiselling a new line in blank wood.
I don’t like how that sounds poetic. I’m not trying to be poetic, I’m trying to say what it was like to be there, but I don’t have the words. Perhaps I should say more about how I felt and what I thought, rather than just describe what’s around me.
I’ve written these sorts of notes since I was a teenager, by the way. I don’t know why – I’ve just felt like writing them. In the next six months I hope to work out why, and what to do with all these scraps of paper and notebooks I’ve amassed.
I decided to make a website for my essays with a system called Astro. Luckily I found I’ve already started a site with Astro for another project, so I’ll just use that.
I got my old Takumar 55mm lens out. It was made in the early 1970s and gives a distinctive colour to photos. It seems to absorb light in a different way to other lenses, and produces warm and saturated colours. I didn’t believe that myself until I did a comparison with a modern lens, with no post processing.
Here is an example. I took a storage heater apart this afternoon, and this is what it looked like inside:
Notice the colours in the concrete in the bottom left of the picture, and the colour of the screwdriver. I haven’t increased the saturation of the image at all.
I need to start drawing. Photography is too quick, and records rather than expresses.
