The other day, in one of the most lovely cities I’ve ever been to, I had the not so common opportunity to spend an extended amount of time wandering at will, taking pictures, with every option before me.
Perhaps in line with my nature, I ended up in a small park next to a museum, spending a good deal of time photographing fish.
We take what comes our way.
I am still on the road in Western Europe, flinging about, slightly homeless, although with our regular home back on the Mediterranean there, and remaining a bit cagey about the location of everything, what with our being on the run from the law, who monitors Clerk Manifesto at all times.
Actually, no one seems to monitor Clerk Manifesto at all times.
Anyway, we are in a lovely city I adore, and here is the latest collection of pictures from it. They are kind of a scattering, applying a small effect that I like enough for this series, but don’t feel likely to pursue beyond this.
So enjoy these while they last.
One of my solutions to the problem of pictures of Gothic churches has been to lay down a layer of water reflecting on the floor as a way to improve and better convey the feeling of those soaring churches in my pictures. And of course, whenever I come up with a solution to one thing, I find it a little bit irresistible to try it out in other contexts, which I have done here. So, without much more comment, this from the fantastic city that we're in now, a collection of pictures that employ this effect as well.
In this incredibly agreeable city that we have found, which is perhaps not normally so hard to find but took us nearly a year, I have found a common problem in some of the beautiful Gothic and Neo-Gothic churches. Which is to say, so many of the pictures I take of them are unsatisfying, usually because of the pew benches and the floor of the church, whether it be littered with people or objects that take away from the soaring craftsmanship of the ceiling and the walls and the apses and the sense of distance.
My solution to this has been one that I have extended around to other places in the city and have used before, particularly in Villefranche-sur-Mer, which is to put water all over the floor. This involves a lot of hose work and permits from the city and hopefully causes no damage after we leave, so it can slowly dry away and return to normal.
But it’s all worth it for the reflections it engenders.
It’s one of those strange confluences of fate that probably mean nothing, but seem extraordinary and as though they should mean something. So why not just have them mean something?
I opened up my phone while walking around the city, only to encounter a feature that my phone provides, whether I want it or not, which is a look at some aspect of my vast photographic past. The feature for that particular moment was photographs I had taken four years ago, which all turned out to be of geese. And it made me wistful to see those geese, since I have not seen any geese in particular since I left Saint Minneapolis.
And I even highlighted a few of those pictures, thinking I might do something with them. Here are a few of those pictures:
Less than an hour later from my running across these images, we walked into a magnificent public park here in the city, and I saw geese.
Very different geese, but geese, French geese!
Here then, are the pictures of those. And with them you have the whole story.
