SOMERSET LEVELS 434 – ANOTHER WORLD (MONO)
December 4, 2019 12 Comments
Walking in The Boulevard, one of Weston’s main streets. It was a wet morning, rain forever around, and there was a lot of surface water. In my path, a large puddle spread across the pavement and, well before I reached it, I could see reflections in it – and so to ramping the telezoom up to 300mm and, standing quite some distance back from it, looking at and into this puddle.
I was looking into another world. There was the reflection of a tall street lamp and, nearer, a street sign too, and the patterns of paving stones were also visible. I’d taken several frames when the reflection of a gull suddenly passed through the frame – and I managed a single shot before it was gone. And thence to simplifying the image by presenting it in mono, and presenting it upside down to make it more readable, while preserving the dreamlike, otherworldly atmosphere.
And, in yet another (this time, bygone) world >>> opposite this spot, 60 years ago, a toy shop called Driver’s was an exciting centre in my young life – forever adding to my vast regiments of toy soldiers, and also allowing me to buy fireworks in the days when they were both affordable and freely available to youngsters like me. For those of you old enough, do Penny Bangers, Jumping Jacks, Volcanoes and Catherine Wheels bring back any memories??? We youngsters used to light a Penny Banger (effectively a small explosive device, costing one OLD penny) and hold it until it started fizzing and was just about to explode, and then drop it into a puddle, when it would shoot across the surface of the water before blowing up: delighted – and retaining all our fingers too – we called it a Torpedo …..
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Technique: Z 6 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 300mm; 3200 ISO; in-camera processing of raw file, using the Graphite profile; further processing in Lightroom; 180 degrees’ rotation; The Boulevard, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset; 22 Nov 2019.
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