burnt embers

Yet again I have stopped to photograph the clematis seed heads at the end of a morning of photography along the Harling Point waterfront. They are just down the street from my house so I often pass by on my way back. This was on Friday, after taking some long water exposures at sunrise (which I expect you will see some of later this week), and then the lichen-on-chimney shots that I started showing yesterday. I had set my tripod down at the end of the driveway and was photographing from behind the hedge when my neighbour walked through the gate that passes beneath this clematis. I gave her quite a fright I am sorry to say. She had come to see why there was a tripod in her driveway and move it to a safer location until the owner came back for it.

She told me a funny story of how a photographer relative of hers was visiting recently and how he was in the garden along the fence line trying to get pictures of berries, causing the neighbour to call the police, thinking he was a voyeur. Urban photographers face such different hazards than the nature buff who tries to capture a mountain goat on the side of a cliff lit by the polar lights while being hounded across a steep and pregnant avalanche chute by a pack of wolves with a ski harness about to give way and unfeelingly dropping minor body parts, such as ears, as frostbite sets in. Rough as that kind of shoot is, and tough as they certainly are, at least wilderness photographers don’t have to contend with gun-toting police, radios and Kevlar crackling with menace, breathing heavy fumes of coffee while on a mission to keep a sleepy municipality clear of vermin like them.

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