A Celebration of The Garden

What do I love most about deep suburb, living on the city's rim? Urban Varsovians have their little balconies and their podwórka, I have this. The sublime. Man and nature in spiritual and aesthetic harmony.

This post prompts me to talk about the use of polarising filters in photography. The circular polariser allows one to get bluer skies. Is this trickery? My view is this. On sunny days, I'm wearing polarised sunglasses. They give this effect. This is how the world looks like to me. So when I photograph my world, I want a subjective record of how a given scene looked and felt to me; I want to conjure up the same atmosphere/mood/feeling I got when looking at the scene.

The same applies to tweaks in Photoshop. As well as judicious cropping and compressing, I use Photoshop to make my photos more vivid - this is usually done by increasing contrast and saturation a touch, and reducing brightness a touch. My aim in doing so is to bring the emotional impact of the photo closer to that which I felt at the time.

As you can see, the blueness of the sky varies from photo to photo. This depends on the camera angle. If you point your thumb towards the sun and form a right angle with your forefinger, it will point to the darkest, bluest part of the sky - and the polarising filter will exaggerate this effect. Of course, you need a single lens reflex (SLR) type camera to see the sky darkening and lightening in the viewfinder as you turn the filter.

How do we keep our garden looking so beautful, you are all asking yourselves. My secret - I do not do a hand's turn but leave it to the professionals who know what they're doing. Eats quite a hole into the family budget over the summer months, but hey! it's worth it.