3 A trick of the light

It’s spring in Milltown, so a young man’s fancy turns, naturally enough, to landscape photography. Well, that’s Colin’s fancy anyway. His working week is spent juggling figures. It’s not a bad job being a bank clerk; the money’s OK and there’s no heavy lifting. But even though banking pays the bills, his heart’s not really in it. By the middle of each week, the figures are starting to crawl over the pages of his ledgers. By the time Friday rolls around, he’s getting cabin fever.

Every few minutes his attention is distracted by the view from the window of his airless office. It’s ‘four seasons in one day’ weather outside: the sort of weather that makes a photographer’s shutter finger twitch, like a trigger-happy gunman in a bar full of strangers. One minute the storm clouds gather menacingly, and somebody around Milltown is getting a severe soaking. The next minute the clouds part, magically, and a slim pencil of light sweeps across the landscape, like a prison searchlight in an old James Cagney movie, searching for a farmhouse, or a hilltop or a ribbon of road to illuminate against the gloom. Colin holds a biro up to his cheek and clicks it at the decisive moment that the composition comes together. It’s just force of habit.

There’s no doubt about it: Colin would rather be a landscape photographer than a bank clerk. But he has to keep it as a hobby, a weekend passion, and maybe that’s for the best. Most people in Milltown have at least one of his framed photographs displayed on the wall. At Christmas his friends and relatives have learned to feign appreciative surprise when they are presented with yet another moody landscape print. They’ve learned that “It’s really beautiful, Colin” is all that’s required by way of response, not “If you’d just moved a few yards to the left, Colin, you wouldn’t have had that telegraph pole in the picture”...

Bob the postman has one of Colin’s pictures hanging in his living room. It hides a damp patch that appeared, due to Bob’s apparent inability to replace the roof-tiles that were blown away in the winter winds. When Bob got married last year he was looking, as usual, to save money. What had seemed like a good idea, when he proposed to his girlfriend, Cath, after a few drinks, was soon getting out of hand. Bob’s wedding suggestion - a perfunctory union down at the Registry Office, followed by a pie & pea supper in the pub - seemed distinctly at odds with Cath’s idea of what a wedding should be. A church ceremony, white dress, garlands of lilies, bridesmaids, a five-tier cake, a reception in a marquee, a sit-down meal, champagne... the works.

Bob tried to compromise, even going so far as to suggest a Seventies disco or a kareoke to follow the pie & pea supper. But a mere man of letters is no match against the combined force of a persistent bride-to-be and her family. One by one his defences fell under the onslaught, and everyone in Milltown agreed that Bob and Cath’s was the wedding of the year. One of the few money-saving ideas that did survive the rather one-sided negotiations was the choice of wedding photographer. Encouraged by Colin’s interest in photography (and discouraged, in equal measure, by the cost of engaging a professional) Bob asked Colin if he would do the honours. Colin, flattered to be asked, but not thinking too clearly, agreed.

Alarm bells should have rung the moment that Colin set up his camera outside Milltown’s smoke-blackened church. As affable as he is, Colin is not really a ‘people person’, and the sight of so many wedding guests, dressed up to the nines, got him flustered. A good wedding photographer should combine the tact of a diplomat with the intransigence of a totalitarian dictator. People need to be told, in the nicest possible way, exactly what to do. But Colin’s a landscape photographer; he’s happiest when he’s on the tops, waiting patiently for the light to change. Forgetting everything he had read in an all-too-brief perusal of the ‘A-Z of Wedding Photography’, Colin reverted more familiar habits. As he rummaged through his camera bag, searching in vain for inspiration, he decided the scene might be improved with a few coloured filters.

It proved to be a big mistake. Instead of being a warm reminder of happy times, Bob and Cath’s wedding album is a perennial reminder of what happens when you hire a landscape photographer to chronicle the best day of your life. The sky in each shot is an other-wordly orange... or magenta... or yellow: any colour except the standard-issue pewter grey that Milltown folk know so well. To look at the pictures you’d guess that a nuclear bomb had exploded on the day of the wedding. Instead of being shown off, proudly, to everyone who calls at the house, the wedding album gathers dust on top of the wardrobe.

Bob and Cath have forgiven Colin (well, Bob has, anyway), though Colin still has occasional nightmares about being chased down a long road by a gang of men in top hats and tuxedos. Now he sticks to what he knows best: getting out and about with his trusty Leica, watching the swathes of light as they drift sensuously over the landscape. It’s his delight to be out at dawn, when the light is doing wondrous things, and the mist hangs in the valley. The local farmers - and maybe Bob on his rounds - are the only ones who see him tramp along the green lanes and out into open country, with his camera bag and his tripod.

The farmers think he’s mad: they only get up at dawn because they have to. Colin, in contrast, does it from choice. On those still mornings when the world looks clean and bright and new, the sheer exhilaration of being outdoors far outweighs the hassle of those early starts. Big, bland, blue skies fail to set Colin’s pulses racing. What he enjoys best is extremes of weather. His preferred forecast is ‘changeable’. The best pictures seem to come at the meeting of weather systems: just before rain and just after. So Colin doesn’t feel he’s had a proper day’s photography unless he’s been soaked to the bone at least twice. Whenever he’s sheltering from a sudden squall, or sitting on a rock, waiting for the light to do something ‘interesting’, Colin feels strangely at peace with the world.

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