Thoughts on imagery, colour and context

I took this photo in 2007, from a ferry going across Sydney harbour.  At the time I remember how odd it was to actually see the Sydney Opera House. I should explain that I'd landed the day before and hadn't yet got my bearings around central Sydney. We'd got on the ferry at the Central Terminal, and were following the curvature of the harbour. You could see office blocks, but an office block is just an office block really, when the office blocks suddenly stopped and around the corner the Opera House came into view.

It was not necessarily that I was surprised by it; the form of the Opera House is so familiar now that it's difficult to find something shocking about it. It was the dissonance between seeing that image and seeing the reality that was startling. The idea of the Opera House was an established fact in my mind, but I had no exposure to its reality. Somehow, and it's difficult to put your finger exactly on why, but encountering the actual building was a transformative experience. I suppose it was just that it had had an artificial existence until then; finding it there, situationally contextualised, transformed my understanding of it.

This meanwhile was from the top of a hill near Ullswater in Cumbria, taken last year. Now on one level it has an immediate resonance with all of us. Personally speaking it reminds me of a long walk I had just taken with my mother (she's off camera), and the Lake poets (who I was thinking about, I believe, when I was taking that shot). On one level then, the image is a universal stimulus (providing of course one provides some sort of contextualisation), but on other it is a uniquely personal memento. If another person was to take the same walk as I, get to that point and take an identical shot, it would still have a different meaning to them than it does to me.

I can't remember when these were taken, but they show part of a field in my village. Here of course the difference is technical. The first shot was designed to take as much colour out of it as I could with my camera, the second to put as much in. I don't know which one of these I prefer. The first one is colder, but to my mind it has a more ethereal beauty to it. The second is far warmer, but occasionally I find its warmth almost intrusive. They were taken within a minute of each other while I was out for a walk; if it was solely a case of assigning memory and feeling to pictures I should have no interest in delineating them. I do though: it's fascinating that you can get so much difference into what is essentially the same shot just by making technical adjustments.