Truth is that I prefer colder weather - not of the damp and miserable kind, but the brisk, bracing cold Saturday morning starts and crisp evenings that permit a log fire. A recent trip into Martinshaw Woods with the Bronica medium format was something of mixed bag. For a start I forgot my light meter, so had to guess at exposure and S/S, which wasn't helped by my overall lack of medium format experience. That said, however, accidents can be the mother of unintended innovation, and some of my favourite photographs certainly fall into that category. It was late in the day and the light was starting to fade, so I opened everything up as wide as it would go and settled on 125 shutter speed - any slower and I was worried that the image would be blurred. The results are a bit of a murky mess, and whenever I make pictures like these I hear John Blakemore's voice telling me that such contrast-y images seldom make for interesting photographs. The image below is a mess, but there's something intriguing about the shiny, sharply angled path that suggests that this path leads somewhere dangerous, almost as if the traveller has to wait until a very particular time of day or year, when the light is just right, to see this secret path magically illuminated. It isn't even a path - just a splash of light on pine needles.
