Alasdair Watson

No, it’s not the cover of a lost Cocteau Twins album.

I may annoy a few of you with the next shot or two, as I go wandering off into the realms of abstract photography for a bit. My apologies – I’ve a conventional portrait of my Dad coming up afterward, just to reassure you all, and possibly answer some of the questions about where I get my looks from.

I don’t normally talk too much about my thoughts and feelings around an image – I like to let people work out what I’m saying, but I think I probably ought to make it a little clearer with this sequence, which are about how I respond to the beauty of nature. I’m firmly with Richard Dawkins, here – “Unweaving the Rainbow” does not destroy it’s majesty, and the more one understands of the scientific process behind the natural world, the more impressive it is. That’s the point of view that gave me the inspiration for these shots.

On the technical side, well, while this image, and the any that follow it are not as strictly composed as my normal work, you’d be mistaken if you thought that all I did was whirl the camera around at random while on a long exposure to get them. As you can probably see, there are three distinct elements to this that the camera was moved in relation to for different periods of time. I didn’t know exactly what the final shot would look like, but I did have some sense of the elements image I wanted to produce.

I’d love to know what you think of them…

Another from Borough. I get hungry just looking at this one.

Other than that, not a lot to say. Sorry. I’ll try and be more entertaining with the next shot.

I was round Borough market this morning. I’ve got a huge pile of “maybes” as a result. Well, five. That’s a lot for me. Normally, if something is a “maybe”, it’s not good enough. This lot, though, I just don’t know if they’re terribly interesting – I like them, I just don’t know that anyone else will see the same things I do in them.

But I digress. This isn’t a maybe. I saw these strange little trees in one of the grocers there, and was immediately struck by the fact that I could not easily connect them with any fruit I’ve ever knowingly eaten.

So I took a photo, and hope to be credited with exposing the alien fruits tat have obviously come to take over the earth. Or at least our citrus groves.

Don’t panic, I’m not going to be doing this to all my photos from now on, but this is another one from the archives that I just couldn’t get the tone I wanted for it. It’s probably the single photo I played with longest, trying to get a lomo-like look to it and never quite getting it right, and it suddenly sprang to mind on the bus home tonight.

There may be a few more of these yet to come – I’m racking my brains trying to thing of the shots that I took in 2005, and gave up on because they looked too real. I’m sure I won’t be able to simply Lomo them all, but you never know, I might be able to retrieve one or two more.

If I start to bore anyone with lomo stuff, do say.