On Preseli

Inspiration, I find, being personal and wherever you might trip over it is never difficult to find on Preseli.

A sweeping vista perhaps. A peculiar/remarkable rock formation. Maybe something utile, left behind and seemingly forgotten as it rusts or peels: reclaimed by nature’s tangle. The shape of birds as they swing about in a moody sky.

Light itself. The light following a rain-shower being the best light there is. Maybe. The most elusive quality. Something worth sticking around for when it’s cold ’n’ wet, and the wind’s got needles in it, whipping round your very corners ’n’ creases: as it often does. How that unfettered light moves now through cleansed air, dust and dirt beaten hard to the ground so that un-diffracted photons proceed, minus any impediment, to your cones and rods. Colours, then, being as sincere as they ever will, the land’s texture at its most explicit.

Preseli, to me, offering all this. The weight of all time gathered thickly in nook and cranny. Patient silence older than rock waits only on the wind’s passing, the rhythmic drum of blood flooding through your ears. And there’s peace to be found, I find, in the space between thoughts where life’s anxieties may be suspended minus the frustrations of effort/concentration.

Seeing: not quite the same as looking.

It is a true thing, I feel, that my camera has taught me how to view the world differently. In those years B.C, it seems, I was looking at everything and seeing nothing. The act then of raising a camera to my eye and with serious intent being something of an epiphany transforming my understanding of those things I see around me. Once you begin seeing rather than looking you will never stop framing and composing regardless of whether you have a camera about you or not.