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Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
2 November 2020
We were in the middle of three things Sunday after when we noticed this scene. The pile had accumulated over some time but we'd learned to turn a blind eye to it.
It's a stack of recently read books whose spines you can't see topped by a set of dust jackets from books currently being read. A girl of our youth taught us to take the dust jacket off to preserve it when we got our sweaty hands on a new book to read.
We have observed that rule to this day.
So Alan Bennett's memoir is just a dust jacket. The stories are not contained within. We liked that even if it made for a floppy horizontal.
The afternoon sunlight was just glowing in the background as it fell on the shelves of our Italian literature collection.
We rather liked the combination of untold stories and shelves of books in the background. And we were lucky enough to have the new Lensbaby Spark 2.0 mounted on our Nikon D200 at the time.
The Spark has a 50mm optic that crops like a 75mm lens on the D200. It also has a variable aperture built into the lens so you can vary the strength of the selective focus effect. And its flexible body means you can point the lens off axis from the sensor to shift the effect around the frame.
We shifted it to keep the dust jacket in focus and blur the background. Just the ticket.
When we look at this image, we feel like sitting down at the keyboard and filling that dust jacket up with a few stories.
It's an invitation to reflect on a life that can quickly get away from you in the middle of three things on a Sunday afternoon.