Exercise

Choose a viewpoint, perhaps looking out of your window or from a café in the central square, and write down everything you can see. No matter how boring it seems or how detailed, just write it down. Spend at least an hour on this exercise. 

What I saw

I am sitting in my attic (which is where my study is) and staring out at the valley outside my window.  It’s a time of social distancing and I can only reflect on how lucky I am that I have such a view, such a space.

Across the valley, which makes the space sound larger than it is, so across the hamlet, our neighbours are having the roof of their cottage replaced, tiles not thatch.  Today though, is a storm and so there is wind and rain that means no work can be done.  For me this is a welcome respite from the noise.  In truth, the noise is not that bad, but we live in a cottage carefully chosen to be in a place with no noise at all, not even a distant echo of road noise.  That is actually harder achieve than one might think in the countryside because most villages have roads through the middle of them, and in the absence of any other noise, the slightest things seems louder than it is.  Anyhow, today I see peace and tranquillity because work has stopped.

There is a low scraping noise at the window which is the Virginia Creeper trailing down our house blowing in the wind and occasionally tapping on the window.  This though is a pleasant sound as it causes me to glance up and see the creeper, which already, in mid-August, is starting to turn into its startling red.

The trees in our valley, or hamlet, are still green but I do see the makings of a yellow tinge to some of them and I reflect, is it really autumn already?  Mid-August seems to have come very quickly in what has been the strangest of years which is some combination of going quickly but at the same time, it seems an age since the COVID lockdown started in March.  

I see the leaves blowing in the wind of the storm and I see the large Ash tree above our house waving wildly and, as I always do, worry about it blowing down.  The Ash is indeed suffering from ash die-back but the tree surgeon tells us it won’t fall.  Just the same, we need to have it cut down before the winter storms arrive, this one has caught me by surprise.  

I see another cottage in our hamlet has lit their fire as I watch the smoke come out of their chimney and blow almost horizontally across the valley.  Looking at the weather forecast on my computer as I write, I see that the wind is going to get stronger as the day goes on, I turn my attention back to watching the ash tree wave in the wind.

Closer now I see a wasp crawling on my window trying to get out.  I have no idea how they get into our attic or where their nest is but I see about 10 a day.  They are strangely placid wasps, they don’t fly around with an angry buzz, they just crawl about on the window or the window ledge and gratefully crawl onto a piece of paper so that I can help them outside; placid they may be but that doesn’t mean I can relax when one is around.  

The postman has arrived, our hamlet is at the end of a long track down the valley and our house is above the road. This gives us a vantage point to watch, or is it spy, on the cars as they arrive.  Our hamlet only has five houses and so when I say watch the cars, I mean the four or five arrivals we get each day, as I said, it’s a peaceful place.  I’m now watching where the postman goes, he is certainly getting blown about and very wet but I wonder if he is coming to our house.  

The sky is starting to brighten so it is looking like the rain has passed, but the wind continues to get stronger.  I can see a buzzard circling above the valley riding the winds and not seeming to care that he, or she, is getting blown all over the place.  

Looking inside, I see our attic.  We live is a cottage that is 350 years old and so the main thing I see is are the beautiful wooden beams that hold the roof up.  They have been here for all that time and it shows.  I can see the tiny holes where once, they were infested with wood worm, not any more!  And I can see the chunks taken out of the wood where it was too ravaged to save.  I marvel at the longevity of the beams and once again make a silent wish that the wood worm really is gone.  

Elsewhere in the attic I can see the other bits of my life, my hobbies at least, I can see the chest which contains all of my camera equipment stored nice and safe away from the ravages of bug and spiders etc (which you get a lot of in cottages) and I can see my guitar and amplifier, as always I wish to myself that I could spend more time playing it.  

I am looking at the two Amazon Alexa on my desk, I use them mainly to play music as a pair, but today I have decided not to play the music, I am enjoying this exercise as much about the sounds as what I can see and of course, if I play music it will drown out the sounds.  That’s a strange reflection that I had never really had before, can we see sound.  I feel that I would not have seen all the things above if I had been playing music as it was their sounds that triggered my attention.  That’s something to remember for the future – perhaps my wife, who has banned all communications technology from our garden room is right – there we have no wi-fi, no phone signal, nothing but nature.  Maybe that is something I will do more often sitting here in my attic. 

Across the hamlet I can see the chickens that our neighbour keeps running up and down their drive, they are not supposed to be as I know that they are away today, the house owners not the chickens. I wonder how they got out and if our neighbours who are supposed to be looking after them have inadvertently left the gate open, a bad move because of the foxes round here. But hopefully, none will be around in the day and they will go home.

Looking down I can see the roof of our neighbour’s garage which is slowly rotting away and is patched up.  We often think it needs rebuilding but at the same time, it all adds to the character of where we live.  This is the Cotswolds, but the not the chocolate box perfection of the north, this is the more rustic south which we think has a lot more life to it.  Next to the garages is the small patch of land that is in fact right in front of our hour and that we would love to buy, our neighbours are not up for it.  It seems destined to be an overground patch of wasted land rather than the nice orchard that we would turn it into – again this is not as ground as I am making it sound, this is just a small strip of land that fronts on to our two houses.  

A DPD van has arrives, a sign of the times and especially during lockdown.  It seems as though he is lost though, which is the normal state of affairs for anybody coming to our hamlet.  Now I am watching the driver wander around our hamlet looking confused.   I hear my wife calling out to him so I guess that we are waiting for a parcel, yes he is now coming our way but cannot find the steps that lead up to our house.  Ah, he has find them, I winder what the parcel is.

That’s the end of my hour so time for coffee!

Learning Points

When reading this exercise, I wondered if there would be much to write about sitting in my attic but actually the act of just sitting and looking reveals a lot of information.  That is the learning point – if you want to tell a story about something, sit and look, for quite a while.  Without sitting, if I were to try and tell the above story in photographs, I would probably have just shot an image looking out of the window and then wandered what else I could take.  Using the technique above, there are a huge number of images I could shoot.

Writing down what I saw has made a big impact.  The act of having to write about the detail in order to adequately describe it means one has to focus on the objects, what is happening quite strongly.  A similar focus when capturing images will reveal quite different results to simply ambling around without much thought.  Mot that I am saying I would do that but the point is about comparisons and I would not necessarily visually look in the same way I did for this exercise if I were only capturing images.  The learning point is to make sure that I do look.

I wrote a lot about sounds, and about thoughts, in addition to what I could actually see.  When capturing images, I think it would be worth thinking about how to capture those too, taking the image beyond the straightforward visual could have a dramatic effect to my images.

Reflection

Could I turn this into a photography project?  Yes I think I could but I have chosen not to for this particular exercise because I feel that it might detract from my writing – much like a film typically does not quite live up to ones imagination of reading the book of the same story.  That is of course an assumption on my part and maybe that is the challenge, to create a project that does live up to the writing, that could certainly be a technique for a project that is always destined to become a photography one – start with writing in an expressive manner and use that to prompt a photography exercise.