From a floating world

Spoilt for choice this time round, and the whole 'frozen in mid-fall' fascination reminiscent of Tarjey Vesaas'
 The Ice Palace,  which deals with mourning and the our attempt to freeze time in order to hold onto lost loves.
Having figured this one out, the leaves suddenly seem more cheerful in their suspended state!

The hunter in us

A leaf and its reflection, seen from below

Do floating leaves elicit the same wistfulness as falling leaves? I have been meaning to find out all week, but by the time the pool emptied today, there was little light left, and I had to work hard to get my small leaf, no bigger than a 50 pence coin, inside the frame. The slow shutter release proved to be a  challenge, especially as taking shots from the bottom of the pool upwards sends the leaves drifting on turbulence.

I'm not happy with the results - underexposed and unsharp, but I caught the mood, which is possibly even more melancholy in these water-shots, and tantalisingly surreal.

What I really enjoyed about today's shoot was the honing of my hunter's instincts: mind fixed on the prey, nostrils flaring for light, pupils calibrating exposure, heart-beat steadied (no idea why, perhaps not to alert the leaf?!), and breath held for each shot. Concentration so acute that I had no awareness of the cold (both water and air were chill), nor of time. But then, that's what I love about concentration, the way it transcends time and incidentals to focus on intent. Photography definitely brings out the hunter in us, and sometimes, even though we come back empty-handed, the experience is too good to miss!

Forever suspended in mid-fall

Peer Gynt and Proprioception

L'heure bleue (blue gloaming or the photographers 'sweet hour'), seen from the back of a Tromsø bus.

It's ages since I blogged, though not so long since I swam, mercifully! No pictures to show for my indoor swims, not even with Sindre and the usual suspects in a pool apparently blessed by the most beautiful views (yep, I'd agree with that, although it was pitch black beyond the diving board!).

So today's theme is a butterfly exercise I've been practising all week in which you spiral forward by kicking your legs, smoothly turning as you do so, some 2 or 3 kicks each as you face up, sideways, down and round till you've done a length or ten. Whereas in most other sports we orientate ourselves according to the ground and gravity, in swimming we only have our own physiological feedback to go on, and a small bias in any one direction causes a cumulative deviation from the axis. I have no idea why this spiralling is so gratifying - probably because it exercises parts of the brain other mischief doesn't reach - but it has kept me happily turning round and round like a propellor on the central shaft of proprioception.

Which in turn reminds me of the current FB discussion with AC friends about Peer Gynt who, I insist, is not the feckless scoundrel he's made out to be. Or if he is, then I am too, for we share much in common: we both keep going round (whether ourselves or the world), we both attempt to stay true to ourselves as we do so, and we are both inveterate dreamers. Besides, how could anybody who elicits such beautiful music be all bad! (Performance of Grieg's Peer Gynt)

Peer Gynt's shadow striding round the world, self vanishing into a halo of dreams,
green trolls and blue twilights just a few winks away!