Etched.

Yesterday’s vintage fly-in at the local airfield here at Compton Abbas attracted the crowds and offered some wonderful photographic opportunities. It also allowed me to indulge a technique I’d not used but long admired, that of capturing portrait images in broad daylight using a flash gun to give the illusion of studio work. That’s the technical stuff out of the way. Who wants to read about how the technique works, it’s the results that matter, granted that you need to appreciate the mechanics in order to anticipate, influence and achieve the end product but it’s the image that counts at the end of the day. The opportunity to capture a few portraits also tapped into a thread I’ve been considering for a while. We live in a world obsessed by fame and beauty, the rich, glamorous and beautiful people captivate us to such an extent that there is never a day that passes without images adorning magazines, papers and publications for the gratification of the public desire it seems. Spare a thought for the ordinary person in the street, the ordinary John ( and Jill ) Doe’s, those that pass almost unseen on a daily basis. Lives not necessarily graced by fame, fortune or good looks, ordinary mortals just eking out the daily grind at whatever level of society that fortune ascribes to them. I live in a rural, agricultural area where there are faces, both male and female, that illustrate the landscape quite graphically, the often hard, uncompromising conditions of life etched in the many lines on peoples hands and faces. The older the individual the more intriguing I find them. I wonder what their life stories have held. What untold tales hide behind the lines never to be told or recorded and ultimately lost with the passage of time. Coming from rural stock it has a poignancy , these are the sort of faces I have known all my life. I know it’s the same in all communities, urban or rural agricultural, there are stories scratched deep in the furrowed, lined faces that we will never know but that are just as important as those of the pampered and preening.