A Different Walk Every Time

Today I'm taking a long lens for a short walk. Just a leisurely stroll from my back door, through the little wood, alongside a meadow and around by the back of the church.

People I meet glance at my camera and generally assume I'm out photographing birds. But a telephoto lens can be used to pick out all kinds of details, like this May blossom just coming into flower on a hawthorn bush.

I think it was Hemingway who said that he always aimed to describe each scene with a few well-chosen details. So a room with a glass of Scotch on a mahogany table with a stag's head above the fireplace transports you in imagination to a Highland hunting lodge. A bare bulb, a mattress on the floor and a hypodermic syringe takes you somewhere entirely different. It's an interesting way to think about taking photographs too.

See, we're in a spring woodland after a night of rain. That's what this lens is good at; picking out those telling details.

No need to photograph the whole tree. A lot can be suggested and brought to mind in just seventeen syllables.

I'm referring to Japanese haiku, of course. Those poems of miniature perfection, just seventeen syllables long. John Cooper Clarke wrote a very silly one that tells you all you need to know.....

To convey one's mood

In seventeen syllables

Is very diffic

Sometimes just looking at things through the viewfinder gives you a whole new perspective. The spaces between can be as interesting as the subject itself.

I like the way that backgrounds can be thrown out of focus to add a hint of mystery.

There's a lot more colour and detail in these horse-chestnut "candles" than I ever dreamed of before I started photographing them.

And far more "candles" on just a section of tree than I would have guessed. How can I have spent a lifetime in this countryside and still be ambushed by these sudden revelations?

A petite "tree" on a twig - and the twig on the branch, and the branch on the tree....

I doubt I'll ever find any of these minute cameos when I next come this way. It's different walk every time. And you'd find something different again, things I'd never  notice in a hundred years.

By the churchyard gate the bluebells are waiting.

From horse chestnuts to chestnut horses. Peering through the hedge, near the wooden footbridge over the river, I see there's a horse in residence once again. I like the unexpected shapes of the out-of-focus leaves.

Turning the other way I spot the church tower through the sea of cow-parsley - another discovery on familiar territory. I turn for home and know that if I get out for a walk tomorrow an alternative set of precious vignettes will await me. Whether I photograph them or just enjoy the walk remains to be seen.

Take care.