After what felt like a long time away, I visited Culpeper the other day to take a new batch of 35mm slides. It certainly feels autumnal now: bright and blustery, the colours are changing to darker greens, reds, oranges. Berries were falling around me as I walked under the canopies (it was a particularly windy afternoon) and the paths were littered with leaves.
I tried to explore a new area of the garden this time – the southwest corner near the compost heap – but I was quite uncertain as to what to shoot. I’ve been photographing in a rather haphazard, random way so far – simply responding to what I’m seeing/finding, capturing ‘little moments’ in a stop-start kind of way, without thinking ahead to how sequences will come together on a timeline. I realised I needed to look back over the images and shots I’ve already collated, to consider the sequences and patterns that are starting to form. I went back to Final Cut Pro and exported a rough edit of just over a minute’s worth of scanned photographs. I set it playing in a continuous loop on my desktop and wrote some notes:
*Walking around, changes announced by the soundtrack
*Black spaces can be useful – pauses
*Difference between slow and fast sequences is like the difference between walking and running?
*Would be nice to see/hear different weather conditions – rain
*Pathways and walking – navigating the space, exploring
*Close-up explorations
*The dark (underexposed) section looks like twilight and gives a very different feeling
This sense of walking is something I’d like to investigate further. And the differences between stopping to look and being on the move.
