A Winter's Tale ...

A week or two back the night winds blew - they really blew - and they delivered the onset of winter. Many trees, valiantly still holding on to their remaining autumn colours shed the remnants of their tattering coats and stood proudly - their stark skeletal forms awaiting the promise of the spring they know will come. Up until then we had enjoyed blissfully warm days, pleasant nights and late autumn rains. The weather forecast for today is possible snow and heavy rain - and single digit temperatures. That’s quite unusual seasonal weather for these parts, but where on earth is weather normal anymore? Out near the Lidgetton Valley is an area called Happy Hills. And this is how the approach road looks today.

In the years when I first owned a camera, colour photography was an expensive luxury. I was so naïve and inexperienced that the first roll of Kodakolor I splashed out on I ruined by using the yellow polarising filter that my old Brownie Box had built in – giving those first attempted Technicolor trials a sickly greenish pallor. How much things have changed, how much I have learned, sometimes through bitter experience. Having threatened to experiment once more with monochrome imaging – this time by choice, I felt this scene was appropriate to try. And, this time I think I was right.