Colour shot

For me it is the vibrant colours that set Azalea’s apart.  I love the yellow and orange in particularly, probably in part because I’m colour blind.  Small red forms drop from view altogether because my retina cannot adequately detect the boundary between reds and greens, and between blues and blacks. Big splashes of colour are fine, it’s just the smaller objects that disappear. Once I’m up close enough the smaller colour blobs take on a distinct shape, further back they are either not there or smudged.  Yellow, on the other hand, never cheats my lying eyes. I love it and see it strongly in the distance and close-up, in small and big objects.

The feature image, and ICM of an Azalea bush, expresses my exhilaration with yellow.  It also summons pity for my long-suffering physics master at secondary school who, nearly 60 years ago, was trying to explain to the bewildered that light could be both a particle and a wave.  My featured photograph definitely depicts the particle (photon) end of this conundrum, but a hint of waves from the ICM leaves some room for doubt. The bright colour and light seem like bullets entering my camera and eyes.

This offering marks the end of my trying to string a series of images together in a progression.  My partner Fiona is a painter and art historian – she says that art scholars used to refer to this evolution of images as “regeneration”, or sometimes “development”.  I prefer the former. Development seems like a cerebral concept of growing up or maturing. “Regeneration” feels more like letting something free that was always there, a promise of new possibilities and new life .. or in this case, new light.  

There are 16 photos in 9 Blips in this “Tunnel vision” series, all from a 90 minutes wander through 150 m. I seem to have gone from emphasis on verticals to more horizontals; from closed to open (me as well as accompanying ecology!); from dark to light; and from suppression to celebration of stronger colour (muted greens and browns of forest giving way to bright greens, blues, touches of red, whites and triumphant yellows). 

What’s next then? I definitely think that it’s time I walked towards colour rather than being rather timid about it.  And I hope to not just use ICM as the main technique for experimenting – it’s been fun and helpful method to encourage me to let go of sharp focus and definition, and to escape strongly structured previsualisation of the images for a while. If Forrest Gump’s mother was a photographer, she might have observed  that “Intentional Camera Movement is like a box of chocolates … you never know what you are going to get”.  Can I now achieve the looser structure and style to my images without using ICM then?
Let’s see what emerges. 

Thanks very much for the inspiration and feedback from many of you out there in Blip Planet.