The sun is slipping towards the horizon and losing intensity as it goes. It's time to shake off the afternoon's heat-induced laziness and get outside. For many this would be a golden hour, for some even further from the equator it might stretch to a couple of hours, for me in Thailand it is squeezed down to golden minutes. I exaggerate a little but it feels that way.
I stop beside a small patch of frazzled grass stems. Two months of rainless, almost cloudless, days have left them looking like stubble on an old man's chin. Crouching down to ground-level, zooming to full telephoto and looking towards the sun brings them to life. Those last few minutes of sunshine feel like an apology for what the sun did to us earlier. It will be back to punish the world tomorrow but it has a lovely way of saying goodnight.
The grass heads glow with colour they didn't seem to have in them before as they dance irratically in the gentle breeze. In truth, they were probably dancing all day but the sun had made me avert my eyes. I certainly wasn't going to be outside dancing with grass through that over-heated afternoon. That would have meant a bad headache and an early night of wondering what on earth had I been thinking.
As well as being able to point the camera towards the sun, getting low down allows for a great depth of layers by looking through all the grass stems. Only one or two are focussed with the rest creating the lovely effect of different amounts of blur and hints of grassy movement.
Looking at the photos now I even doubt whether the colour is actually real. I can't say precisely but I do know that a long lens can give the impression of colour infused through a filter. I didn't use a filter and left the saturation untouched. A little increase in contrast can strengthen the glow and the vaguaries of auto-colour-balance could always play a role but in my heart I know that grass of gold is very close to what I saw through the lens. With my naked eye it wasn't so obvious because the rest of the wide view interferred. All the other grass and trees and bare earth may have had a warmer tone than an hour earlier but without the sun absolutely directly behind it there was little magic. A long lens angled towards the sun gave that small patch of grass something special that was real but I do concede it would have been hard to see without the camera.
In this sense each photo is not really a record of a view, it is an exposure to a view. The camera was a tool for seeing something not quite available to the naked eye. A bit like the expression on a boxer's face photographically frozen in time as he takes one on the chin. Or the macro detail in a dragonfly's eye that my own eyesight isn't quite capable of resolving anymore. The trick is to find the opportunities for your camera to reveal things to you.
These last two pictures are an interesting example of how focus is perhaps not that important in this type of photography. They are basically the same shot but with a different focal plane. It's good to have something in focus but which particular bit isn't as key as with most photography.
