Photo walk [Clare, SA]

I’m playing around with Canon and Nikon lenses on my Sony a7 and my Sony a5000. A Canon ef 28-90mm is on my a7 and the Nikkor af 50mm f1.8 is on my a5000. Using these lenses creates some new creative challenges, firstly because I need to manually focus the lenses (and have to pull my glasses out every time I take a photo). Yet, the lenses also render some character to the otherwise quite clinical quality of images from Sony. I am all about nostalgia as an aesthetic principle. Perhaps because I sense we are in a time of massive change, and significant losses—climate change is so very evident where I live now. We are losing crops which might sound tragic for the farmer but is far more tragic for our populations which need food to survive, and of course, the cost of living crisis is already making food unaffordable.

I am of an age now, where I remember some decades where we didn’t have such concerns (and probably should have), and an era before technology entered our daily lives and altered our ways of relating to each other, and sharing knowledge, etc. As I walk around taking images, and having a lovely time doing so … I do occasionally wonder if I am documenting “life as it was” for a near-future population who will only have memories and artefacts to ponder as we collectively face the consequences of so much inaction and slow response to nature’s assertion that we will be the losers in this scenario where our climate is tilting so far out of balance that we might be assuring our own destruction.

And that’s the rub isn’t it? Every beautiful, sunny and pleasant day we enjoy is potentially on borrowed time.