A Sliver Of Silver

Taking Leaf Of My Senses

Photographs copyright: DAVID McMAHON

It’s been a fair while since I sketched or painted with any seriousness. Make that ten years, actually. But when I am privileged to see scenes such as this, I wonder to myself if there really is a distinction between a photographer’s instincts and a painter’s instincts.

Do we see things in the same way? If painting occupies one section of my brain and photography occupies another totally distinct section, which one really switches on when I pick up my camera and which one is activated when I have my sketchpad and paintbrush?

I know this is open to debate, but I reckon it’s a bit like having two adjacent townhouses on a single block of land.

Each property has its own entrance, its own mailbox, its own décor and its own personality. Yet both townhouses share the same garden, the swimming pool and the tennis court. Both townhouses are warmed by the same ray of sunlight. Both are chilled by the same layer of glistening winter frost on their separate roofs.

So the way I figure it is simple. I’d say there is a fair bit of overlap between a painter’s brain cells and a photographer’s brain cells.

When I was about ten years old, I painted a landscape in varying nuances of one colour. I thought it was pretty special. When I showed it to my mother, who was my Google, my mentor, my guide and my earliest inspiration, she told me it was a monochrome. I’d never heard the word before, but when Mum explained (as she always did) the significance of "mono" and "chrome", it all made perfect sense.

Sometimes monochromes simply dominate everything in view, like the shot I took three years ago in Quebec City. But on the other hand, sometimes monochromes play hide-and-seek with us, presenting themselves coyly behind the veil of "normal", perfectly defined, high-definition, full-palette landscapes.

The shot above was taken during a short breather on a recent hike through Kluane National Park. In reality, it was only a very tiny slice of the stunning scene in front of me. It was early fall and the colours at ground level and downhill were a stunning array of red, burgundy, lime, bronze, orange and some small patches of strong green. Beyond that was a blue and silver lake. Dominating the skyscape was a range of snowy mountains.

High above me, a small wedge of sky caught my attention. The early-afternoon sun was peeping weakly through fast-moving cloud. In a few seconds the cloud would have passed and the sun would no longer be obscured. I guess I "saw" the shot and knew I had to act fast.

The prevailing light meant that the leaves themselves could be used as strong silhouettes. I shot only two frames, both with my 18-125mm Sigma lens. The first had the vertical branch in sharp focus and the second (below) had the furthest horizontal branch in sharp focus.

Let’s say you viewed the entire scene as a clock face. If you started at the very top, where the clock hands show noon, and worked your way completely around and back to the start, each hour showed a different scene spanning a vast array of colours. The minuscule wedge of sky in these two shots was perhaps a three-degree arc in the 360 degrees available to me - but they were three degrees of validation, not three degrees of separation.

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