And another thing...
In February 2020, Worcester was underwater for about the 6th time in a year. The river Severn was as high as it has ever been. Whilst we are used to flooding, this was exceptional, with high water preventing normal access over the city bridge. This of course made for some interesting photo opportunities, which I duly posted on twitter. One scene in particular became clear to me and probably wouldn't have appealed to anyone else. With so much water around you get reflections that you would not ordinarily see which, when you know the place makes a picture more impactful (hate that word). I took several such shots but the one below sticks out in my mind. At this point the river is some 6m above its normal level and had overcome the flood protection. This is the main road alongside the river. I think it was the arrangement of cones as well as the reflections that drew my interest. Both the cones and the reflections are not normally there, and it just appealed to me. I spent some processing it, trying to make it more conventionally appealing. But it seems my efforts were fruitless as no one else really got it. Now in other aspects of landscape photography you would write it off and come back tomorrow or whenever and wait for better light. But in this case I couldn't do that. This was the only opportunity as the water level was changing and by the following day it had dropped and this scene was gone. It was a one time thing. And I was just unable to translate the aspects that had caught my interest and attention into a decent photo. Maybe it was not possible, maybe it was just not inherently interesting enough. But this is the fundamental way I take pictures, by identifying those scenes and quirks and patterns that connect my neurons together in the right way. It may not be appealing, but it tells you something about how I see the world. For the sake of completeness I will add in a few other photos of that flood and expose you to a bit more of how I saw the world during the flood - the Deluvian view, which might have been a better title!
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AuthorOptical physicist and frustrated photographer Archives
March 2023
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