It's really wonderful Tim!
How is the picture taken. IOW where is the camera!
Thanks Asher, you're very kind! The camera is held in my extremely cold hands as I bob about in the water and the lens is approximately half under and half over the water.
This is an exceptionally fine photograph. It immediately commands attention with its two related zones of blue sky and water, with the sky only under 1/3 of the height of the image.
It constitutes what I call a "unit of Art" a work which in itself demands nothing additional or less and can have a life independent of the photographer and artist and also serve it's function as art for us.
The title, "Underwater Love" tells me that either there is a love in the water or love from the perspective and position of water. Now this is what we get from the title and we can try to learn more by spending time looking at the picture, returning again and wondering how it might fit in to the photographer's mindset. With a little more introduction, we could do that perhaps.
However, there may be not much more than we see here. Fine, then we bring out own experience, values and imagination to this and these will inform our minds to generate all sort of interesting possibilities. Since it does all these things, this, by my standards is worthy of the term Art!
The importance of this work will grow according to the rest of the body of photography your produce. But on its own, I find this really wonderful and impressive.
Thanks for sharing.
Asher
Thank you again!
I gave a false clue here, for which I apologize: the subject line
Underwater Love was a reference to the fact that I love the ease, cheapness and small size of the W300 in its underwater housing - and that I love using it (despite the cold!) so in fact the photo had no title - but the one you propose for it has some connection to what was in my mind when I took it.
This is complicated. Virginia Woolf, the English novelist, spent much of her adult life near Lewes in Sussex, where I was raised. These days I live part of the time in St Ives, Cornwall, where VW also spent time and, though in her novel To the Lighthouse, the lighthouse in question was in Scotland, she based its physical description on Godrevey Lighthouse, which is the one you see in the photo. So I have a sense of connection with her and with the lighthouse.
She committed suicide by weighting her pockets with stones and wading into the river near my home town. So when I saw a woman leaning forward over the stone jetty in the photo, as if she might jump, I moved so as to connect the end of the jetty visually with the lighthouse (in fact they are miles apart and in no way connected...)
The jetty is something I have photographed many times, particularly as part of another series I am working on, so I tend to hang around it when the sea or the light are interesting.
The photo we're discussing here has joined a new series I'm working on where I'm trying to explore the visual symbols of St Ives. It's a long and involved thought process, better expressed visually, but I did it once before with Zermatt and the fetish that is the Matterhorn. The difference is that in St Ives there are more symbols and each is less individually strong but the lighthouse is the closest to the Matterhorn!
So there we have it: my weird thought processes give a meaning (to me) which is totally different to the meaning that others take from it. And both are equally valid! Now I just have to rework the original JPEG file (the W300 only shoot JPEG which is a real change for me, like having a polaroid!) so as to get a decent print from it!
All the best
Tim
