Winter Sun on Shapwick Heath

Winter Sunshine on Shapwick Heath, 22nd January 2012

I've been trying to photograph the landscape of Somerset for a number of years now, without much success. I've come to the conclusion that this is because, at some fundamental level, I don't understand this countryside.

I should say that Somerset is very different to the landscape that I grew up with and the ideas that I received about what constitutes natural beauty.

I come from Liverpool and spent my childhood and youth living in an urban environment. Family holidays were spent in North Wales, Scotland and the Lake District. Grandeur - at least the British version of it - was the aesthetic that I was taught.

Those landscapes still speak to me. I hadn't been in any of those environments for a number of years until I visited Cumbria late last year whilst working and I was surprised at the strength of my emotional reaction. This was underlined when I found old holiday snaps in my Dad's house, recently.

Back to Somerset and a walk in the Shapwick nature reserve on a sunny day in January, during which I captured the photograph above. Perhaps it was just a fluke or maybe I'm beginning to get the place, but I think that this image is different to my previous efforts and signposts the way forwards when I come to point a camera at the flat, open spaces around here.

Munari Schunari

Recently, I read "Design as Art" by Bruno Munari. Now, one of the things that I find really irritating is when I buy a book which purports to be an original work by the author, and it turns out to be reprinted journalism or other "collected writings". And so this volume turned out to be. My chagrin wasn't lessened when I found out that Munari stated his central premise (that form should follow function) in the first few pages, then proceeded to reiterate ad nausiem.
Munari was also a terrible futurologist. I soon realised that any sentence that started "The home of the future will have..." would end badly. If he had been correct, we would all be living in traditional Japanese style houses, projecting coloured patterns onto our walls for entertainment. Thank God we invented the interweb.
However, tucked away in one of later chapters was a description of how to create Moire patterns using grids of squares or other geometric shapes. Munari wrote about using transparent slides and an overhead projector, but the thought struck me that these patterns would be very easy to creat digitally using an image editor.
So I had a go and the process turned out to be quite addictive. Three of the best patterns are shown above. They're not very original - there are probably countless hotel lobbies with floors tiled just like these, but experimenting is fun and distracts me from some of the other stuff that's going on in my life.
I'll continue with this until I get bored and/or run out of inspiration and I may post some more patterns if they're presentable.

The Lesson of Landscape

Burnham-on-Sea, February 2010

Photography has taught me that the same moment never happens twice. This may be self evident to most people, but it was in attempting to photograph the landscape that I understood it at an intuitive level.

You may think that the scene that you're photographing is pretty prosaic and that, if you don't get the shot this time, you can return and take it again.

Wrong.

The photograph above works because of the way the clouds mirror the curve of the beach. That won't happen again, and if it does, I won't be there to see it.

The name of this blog is a corruption of the saying that "you can't step into the same river twice". You can't capture the same light twice.

I find this thought comforting when I'm following my usual routine and one day feels much like another.