Seeing Beauty Everywhere
I opened the door of the Victorian terrace and looked eastward down the street - not a tree, shrub, flower, leaf, bird or blade of grass in sight. My heart felt about as grey as the sky above as I longed for the abundance of nature I had left behind on our little 27 acres of paradise in Australia. This was my new home in the centre of England for a few years.
It was time to search for a new kind of beauty because if you open your eyes, you will find beauty in every place. So I turned to the west and at least there were some trees down the other end of the street.
I’m a nature lover so I made it my mission to seek out nature in this very urban environment. A place that seemed to have been felled and paved and bricked all over about two hundred years ago. I collected leaves during all seasons, went out with my camera like a mad woman in the middle of winter photographing frost and snow, took treats in my bag to befriend the squirrels who lived in the church yard and spent many a day walking in the ‘common and woodland’.
Moss, lichens and fungi are old favourites with their beautiful colours, textures and forms and they all grow frighteningly well with the lack of sunlight! It was strange walking through unfamiliar trees and vegetation, it took a while to realise that they are not weeds - they are only weeds in Australia because they are introduced! But I did manage to get stung on more than one occasion by rearranging what I thought was a pretty frond to photograph and finding out in no uncertain terms that it was a nettle.
One Saturday, I led a photo walk as part of a world wide charity event. When the photos went online, one of the locals who had grown up in the town commented that I had made her ‘boring’ town look amazing and beautiful and that she had never seen it that way. I think that was simply because I approached it with fresh eyes. It is something I’ll try to remember when I start to feel stale or lacking inspiration - to try to look at the familiar as an outsider.
Most people don’t need convincing that there is beauty in history. Patina and the unspoken story behind the visual effects of the ageing process seems to be universally appealing. Europe is a perfect place to pursue history. Everywhere you turn there old, worn things or beautifully crafted pieces from days gone by. You have to wonder about the many lives of those whose boots trod the stone steps and left their impression. Of course there are millions upon millions of artefacts carefully stored in museums. The very famous ones are visited by crowds daily, but most are sitting waiting to be discovered by you and I.
Untamed nature will always draw me, but I have learned to appreciate the cultivated fields and gardens of Europe and England. Hedgerows contain an entire world within them and stone walls are beautifully crafted but it is the details of the garden that capture my attention when I visit. Who can resist a weathered gate, an unusual latch, a collection of Victorian cloches or even some hand thrown terracotta pots?
There is something heartwarming about the process of hand creating objects that I wish I could bottle. Last year, back in Australia, I was able to visit the Lost Trades Fair at Toowoomba and photograph some of the talented workers there. It was sad to see some of the older generation who didn’t have any young apprentices to pass their huge amount of skills and knowledge onto.
Perhaps because of the lack of nature around my English home, I often bought flowers and because it is so cool, they lasted a long time, usually at least three weeks. Every bunch of flowers that came into my home, I photographed with the macro lens. It is a perfect opportunity to slow down and appreciate the artistry of nature. The closer you get, the more you magnify the petals, the more you see other worlds - landscapes. Georgia O’Keefe said “ Her work is fascinating because it is so simple, yet she created it from a place of looking deeply at the details.
It is even more satisfying to take the macro lens outdoors and photograph plants in nature especially when the sun is shining. Leaves and seedpods reveal their delicate skeletons when the light shines through them, so I am always on the hunt for that perfect light.
Do you notice the many different ways that light sparkles on water? I think it is a very under-rated phenomenon. So often, we see millions of tiny diamonds sparkling on leaves, or blades of grass, or the ocean, or a pond. Have you stood at the beach early in the morning, watching the waves curl over, one after the other with the sun shining through from behind, and simply admired the turquoise transparent, glassy looking water?And if sunlight sparkling on the ocean is something wonderful to behold - what about moonlight on the waves? It is breathtaking! Sometimes I like to defocus the lens a little and create another world, one a bit more dreamy, more like the one I experience than the one I see with my eyes.
The other day, I was standing on the headland, watching a pod of dolphins splashing and having quite a wild feeding frenzy. A young Japanese girl was extremely excited to see the dolphins and the young man she was with made a very casual and quite tragic comment. He said “I’ve seen plenty of dolphins before.” It took everything in me to keep quiet. I wanted to reply that I’ve seen thousands of sunrises, but I will never take one for granted, I’ve hatched countless chicks and ducklings and will always feel the wonder of seeing each new life emerge and I will never lose the excitement of spotting a pod of dolphins.
