Closer

There's some kind of parable in this shot of Southampton Docks, with its empty parking lot, the ranked vehicles awaiting export, and those impressive heaps of metal scrap beyond. Here's a closer look:

As mentioned in earlier posts, a casual visitor to town could be forgiven for not knowing the docks were there at all, apart from the giant hint visible at the end of many streets.

Again, here's a closer look:

Admittedly, I've fallen into the habit of walking around with moderately wide lenses (a 40mm equivalent on Fujis, and a 28mm equivalent on the Ricoh GR), but it's interesting how much better – for me, anyway – the "zoomed in" view conveys the psychological equivalent of the view ("Crikey, look at the size of those cranes!", and, "Wow, is that all scrap metal?") despite the fact that the full picture angle does accurately reproduce the actual view.

This discrepancy is nowhere more evident than in pictures that feature the sun or moon. Setting aside the unsettling coincidence that both heavenly bodies appear exactly the same size when seen from planet Earth (spooky!), the fact that both represent about half a degree of arc in the sky means that even the most striking lunar or solar manifestations are, like Auden's Icarus in the poem Musée des Beaux Arts, tiny events on a much wider canvas. Take Monday, for example: the outer skirts of hurricane Ophelia brought a thick sampling of Saharan dust into our atmosphere, creating an eery yellowish-orange half-light, somewhere between dawn and a solar eclipse. At its height it was downright apocalyptic; the picture below was taken at 3:00 in the afternoon, as the phenomenon began to recede. What caught my attention at that moment was the reappearance through the thinning cloud of the sun as a pinkish blank disc, extraordinary to behold, but impossible to represent with a "normal wide" lens roughly equivalent to the eye's angle of vision. It's a nice picture, and it's what I saw, but it's not really what I was seeing.

I can't be the first person to observe that narrowing the angle of view is a useful way of representing the brain's ability to concentrate on and isolate a detail within the visual field. Your eye has no "zoom" facility, and yet it feels as if it does. And that is one reason why, when it comes to making artistic statements and gestures, I'm currently finding it is more effective to construct images from photographic components than to seek out whole real-life, ready-made photographic scenes that express what I want to say. It is also more efficient, as I can trawl my backfiles looking for the bits and pieces I need, or if necessary go out hunting for them. I wouldn't say it's easier – have you ever tried extracting something as elaborate as a crane from its context? – but, once you've got your cranes, boats and planes ready, you're all set to play a very enjoyable game.