A sun enthroned in heaven

"An image of the sun enthroned in heaven, radiating one thousand beams of light:
Were one to shower bright rays of light upon all beings, how exellent." - The Seventh Dalai Lama

Light plays a very important role in my work, its something I find tremendous beauty, divinity and inspiration in. I look at people like Turner and I find inspiration in the way artist like these captured the subtle interplay it creates in our world.

Spiritually I find it very uplifting as well, I see God in the way that the sun comes out from behind the clouds and the way that street light comes through trees.

Its something I'm always trying to capture and never quite reaching, this sun enthroned in heaven.

An urban apocolypse

Sometimes I swear my photography has a will of its own. I picked up my camera with the explicit intention of going out to take a bunch of colourful urban photos. Halfway through editing my pictures decided otherwise.

Colour became monochrome, darkness crept into my work and the sky went from vivid blues to dark and ominous greys. The world and the language of my photos had suddenly changed and instead of riotous colour. I was now looking at a world nearing its end.

It was changed in short order to a very urban apocolypse.

A charcoal sky

For the first few months of spring I decided to go out and try and capture the mood of the season. Unfortunately that mood had been predominately one of cold, sleet and steely grey skys. And while this wasn't idea for exploring or taking holidays it was perfect for capturing moody dramatic pictures of the sky.

Under this chrome dome branches from the trees spread capillary like over clouds and man made monuments alike. In the background the building sat like black sentries. It was a beautiful and apocalyptic world to explore with my camera.

As I wandered I took my time to sketch shade and light, capture contours, branches and leaves. In other words I changed the world with my camera and with it drew a charcoal sky.

Spellbound

Walking back home through the back streets of Cardiff I was struck one by how large and bright the moon was that night. Its strange, pale light lit the night and cast an unearthly glow upon the streets below. I was instantly spellbound.

Taking pictures that night I followed the moon. Capturing passing street lights and strangers, shadow filled roads and the buildings that had been caught in the glare of these strange and beautiful lights.

Buildings became haunted houses, passing strangers became romantic and other and trees became arcane and occult bewitched by the light of the moon.

For that night the streets of Cardiff weren't the same, for that one night the city wasn't the same. Under that unearthly night everything became spellbound.

A metal and plastic sky

A year or so ago I discovered the joy of finding reflections in unorthodox surfaces; puddles, rivers, concrete and windows. All these I poured over looking at new angles from which to take photos at.

One day I was at a bus stop with my camera and when I looked up I was inspired for above me was a second sky, one of metal and plastic. I always meant to return to explore more of the strange sky but I never did, until now.

Its been raining over Cardiff today, so I was taking shelter under a bus stop with my camera when I looked up. Immediately I knew what my latest blog post would be about. I explored a number of stops in my area as the light over head changed from a grey grizzled sky, to a deep bruised colour before finally setting into night.

It was a new world, a colourful and bright on that shimmered and shivered with all the colours and reflections of a metal and plastic sky.

Night by the riverside

On the weekend I took the bus up to my local park, I had felt a desire to take pictures on the riverside there for a while but hadn't got the chance until this weekend. But I stopped procrastinating and actually took the trip there.

The night had transformed what was a tranquil area in day time into something quite otherworldly by the cover of darkness. I met with a friend and wandered this suddenly wild world. The street lamps along the way made each path leading into the darkness into a living fairy tale. One where a fey and strange creature could lay in wait to pounce at any moment.

The tree branches stretched over the river over a grey and purple sky. And in that moment I could imagine that in that night I was on a silent road by the river that would lead to grandmothers house where the big bad wolf would devour me whole and where the fey folk would ride out across a bruised sky.

On a night by the riverside the world was suddenly filled with dark and mysterious magic.

Urban brushstrokes

After spending the last few weeks focusing on nature I decided that I wanted to push myself in a different direction. The urban world isn't one I explore often with my photography but it was very much one that I decided to explore this week.

I wanted to apply my more impressionist technique to the streets of Cardiff and with the recent wet weather the streets had become glowing canvases on which to paint with light.

The colours, the lights, the people wandering its streets became the perfect subjects from which to create an impression of the city at night. From these elements I sought to capture the neon soaked painting of passing cars. The feeling of strangers passing through the night and the ghostly outlines of the houses that lined the way.

It was through these that I sought to create something different. To build up a picture of the night, build upon a thousand urban brushstrokes capturing the shimmering Cardiff night.

The colours of decay

For me autumn is a time for the beautiful and slow creep of decay as the season ticks slowly over into the depths of winter. The leaves change colour and sweep off the trees, the air becomes crisp and cold and wind and rain lash member of the public poor enough to be caught without an umbrella on their commute to work.

It was this sense of colourful decay that I set out to capture with my camera today. At first I was setting out to capture the changing of the season through the subtle shift of nature in the urban world, but as usually when I actually got halfway through taking pictures the emphesis had begun to change.

I grew fascinated by the disintegrating posters that had peeled away to leave layers of vibrate colour behind, the rusted garage doors now covered in metallic street art and the vibrate graffiti scrawled over the streets of Cardiff.

Entropy had caused the world to drip and melt with a rainbow of hues and shades. And what I had come out to photograph had changed, instead of the natural oncoming of autumn I had caught instead the urban world's vibrate colours of decay.