I am often told that A Moment of Stillness is a favourite image of many viewers of my work. The colours and vibrancy of the image, combined with the abstract nature of the photograph, are cited as the main reasons.

This image comes from a series of work titled Yes! I am a long way from home! The concept behind the series of images was to freeze and encapsulate the fleeting glimpse of ‘something’, to which we all experience whilst traveling and gazing out on our constantly changing surroundings. That feeling of, ‘did anyone else see that?’ but never really knowing if anyone did. The series also contains images which have a dream like appearance, fluid and moving, artifacts of the weary traveler who does not sleep.

Unlike many other sets of images I have compiled, photographs within Yes! I am a long way from home! involved very little time to stop and compose, check the camera settings are correct, and then recompose if I didn’t get what I planned. Furthermore, we often cannot choose the time of day we are travelling or the weather conditions at the time, so with these photographs we are seeing something just ‘as it was’, which lends a sense of innocence to these images, rarely found since the advent of digital photography.

A Moment of Stillness was taken during early May, 2008 whilst on a long distance bus ride between Riga, Latvia, and Tallinn, Estonia. The following map shows a rough approximation of the location the image was shot, on the Latvian Road A1 (E67].

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A warm sunny previous week had allowed the greenery to flourish, sprouting everywhere, awoken from the long winter slumber by the mild spring days and long daylight. This is the primary reason why there is so much colour and vibrancy to the image; the red-tan trunks of the Scots Pine, backdropped upon an effervescent green forest floor, pale blue skies, and shining silver birch all lit up by the warm low sunlight. Shadows add depth to the image, whilst the slow shutter creates the movement to make the image abstract; to make a very normal forest picture into something very different, not unlike when we let our gaze rest on a far off point when the foreground is moving past us rapidly.

For me, the most interesting part of this photograph is how the blurred silver birch trunks resemble barcodes. To an extent, they almost look like they have been transplanted into the image as a multiple exposure, a ghostly after effect. However, no post-processing was undertaken other than squeezing the levels to boost the contrast. If I could re-take this photograph again (not withstanding that this is a very organic once-off shot), I would recompose to balance the left side of the image with the right. There is a vacant space with no birch trees on the right hand side but an over-emphasis on birch trees to the left. These are minor details, however, and A Moment of Stillness remains one of my favourite shots as it does to many others.

Please check out the gallery Yes! I am a long way from home! for more images.

Technical Details:
Aperture: f/10
Exposure Time: 1/50 sec
ISO: 800
Focal Length: 25mm
Post-process: levels