Taking a closer look at the world

A friend of mine recently observed that on a beautiful, sunny day in Canterbury everybody seemed to be in a rush, few seemed to be taking the time to appreciate that rarest of occasions, a British summer's day. This travesty is, unfortunately, all too common in world where many become twitchy if a communication takes longer than a nano-second to be returned. So, this post is dedicated to taking a closer and longer look at the world, both natural and man-made and before and after the snap: be it the intricate make-up of petals on a flower; the wave-like effect of bark peeling from a tree or the water droplets skimming off the feathers of a bathing goose.

Many of the photos you'll see below are a result of me experimenting with the Macro function on my camera. These shots I then took home and played about with on i-Photo. I have divided them up and put them under four self-explanatory titles: 'Birds and Bees', 'Flowers and Trees', 'Wood, Metal and Concrete' and 'Plants plus People'. I hope you like them.

NB:Where they were taken is not really important, but there will be a short description under each picture/group if needed.

Birds and Bees:

Wildfowl of the Serpentine:

Close-up of Egyptian goose plumage

Mooching like a moorhen. 

Flowers and Trees

Daisy chain

 

Wood, Metal and Concrete

Locks in Hyde Park

Time for art plastique (métal) a Marseille

    

Books and what they're made of

Writing on the wall (or door)

Plants plus people

The unexpected garden (15eme)

Aix-treme chic

 

These last four photos are among my favourites from the last year and almost purely because I came across them unexpectedly.

The lovers' names scratched into the bark of a tree, clichéd but, by tweaking the saturation levels, the sap becomes bloody and the image takes on a sinister quality.



The computer's off, there can't be anything worth seeing on the screen, or can there?

Photo by Stephen Gildersleve

The seed pod that fell onto just that spot on my rucksack


and (my favourite photo of the year) .... a tree's detritus caught and collected in the eddy of a flushed out gutter.



Small things, unexpected things, things found where you wouldn't normally find them or found by simply looking a little closer. So, next time you're out in the sunshine with your iPhone, just let your eyes wander a little...you never know what you might find.

Just a quick addendum...

My friend Steve, who took the computer photo and has been to more places in the world than I can name, is currently compiling a video scrapbook of one-second recordings taken each day of his life this year - things that meant something to him, summed up the moment, or simply caught his eye. - He's up around the 120s at the moment, but by the time he's finished, he'll have just over six minutes of footage that could mean something different every time he looks at it. A year's worth of memories, emotions, weather, people and nature distilled into 365 seconds of film. - Why pick that one second out of the thousands more that took place each day? "Why not?" is what I say. Now, that's what I call living for the moment!