There is little I like more than the chance to see the world, or at least a tiny part of it, from a different perspective. And that often means getting high up to look down. Whether from a plane, a hot air balloon, a tall building or a mountain (preferably reached by cable car!), things always look different from above.
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If colour is the language of dreams, what about the many names we use to describe colours? Yes, we can say blue, red, green, yellow, pink, and everyone will have a mental image of each colour as it is named. But will we all have the same image? There are so many reds, so many greens, so many pinks … You get my drift!
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Is resilience something we are born with, or can it be developed? The answer seems to be, a bit of both. We all have an innate level of resilience, but our attitude to life and the knocks we receive along the way can strengthen or decrease it. Perhaps surprisingly, many people who have faced the toughest challenges demonstrate the highest levels of resilience; they have needed to.
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Islamic art shuns the depiction of living figures, whether human or animal, partly to avoid any suggestion of idolatry and partly because it is believed that the creation of living forms is Allah’s prerogative. Instead the emphasis is on geometric forms as well as calligraphy and abstract floral motifs.
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The choice between colour or monochrome for a photo is a very subjective one. Some people simply don’t like black and white photography, seeing it as old-fashioned, unnatural and unnecessary. Why remove the colour from a scene, they ask, when we see the world in colour. Why show things as less vibrant, less varied, less colourful than they really are?
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When I was (much) younger I used to marvel at older people saying how quickly time passed, but now I see that they were right! It’s hard to believe that another year is over, when it seems as if it’s barely begun!
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The people who live in some houses do literally ‘live in colour’. Blues, pinks, yellows, reds – or even all of them at once! While we do have some cheerfully painted houses in the UK, they tend to be the exception, and even then, pastel colours are usually preferred over brights. But in other parts of the world, it seems, the brighter the better.
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In the US they are store fronts and in the UK we call them shop fronts, but whatever you call them they can be attractive / bizarre / interesting / or most often, just dull. We barely notice the dull ones that we see every day, so when we come across one that isn’t it is bound to stand out. No wonder many of us stop to take a photo!
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We all have photos that didn’t make the final cut when selecting the best from a day’s shooting, but which weren’t so disappointing that we discarded them. Maybe they are significant to us because of the subject matter even if we don’t feel they represent our best efforts. Or maybe we keep them planning to try to work on them in the future because we feel they have potential.
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I confess I’m not a fan of winter, it’s my least favourite season. Yes, I love Christmas: enjoying festive celebrations with family and friends, decorating the house, seeing the lights in London. And I can get pleasure from crisp sunny days, perfect for a walk whether in London or on a Northumberland beach. But I don’t like grey skies, and I especially don’t like the shorter days and longer nights.
