Evening. One day last week, after rain. I walked across the hill side and up to the top of Moel Eiddew to hear the wind blow unhindered and exorcise the fizz of the city in my head. On this low and unfrequented summit just south of the main bulk of Snowdonia I set up my camera and gazed for a few minutes at the rather other-worldly juxta-position of bleak moorland and modern technology. 

Standing by the wind farm, the breeze is made visible by the graceful spinning of the blades and the swoosh of their passage through the constantly moving air. I had never been so close before to one of these gigantic constructions that the first sight of them made me start. While I attempted to fathom the surprise I was feeling I came upon the realisation that I felt out of step: out of step with modernity, out of step with the mountains and in some kind of nomansland between the two.
 
Standing next to my hand-made, self-designed pinhole camera, before this display of albeit admirable technical wizardry, I felt like Don Quixote tilting madly at windmills. I imagined the electricity which was being generated before me being sent off through the national grid to its various uses: powering factories, streetlights, televison sets, sound systems, burglar alarms... 

This somewhat odd notion led me to reflect on some of my own values. A list sprang immediately to mind. I believe I value quality rather than quantity, silence over noise, the hand-made over the mass-produced, reflection over entertainment, challenge rather than convenience, simplicity over sophistication, the idiosyncratic rather than the conventional, slowness over speed. I might here be comparing digital and pinhole photography (though, explicitly, I am not) but the comparison is easy to draw. I realized too in that split-second that this beautiful, simple method of communciation was as much part of my way of seeing as the glasses on my face and that the insane nobility of Don Quixote is present in all of us who partake in these rather quirky, anachronistic photographic methods. 

Perhaps we will end up sane and broken like the Don, though I hope we don't. In the meantime I will continue to preserve and revel in my enjoyment of unconventional and keep tilting at the windmills: crazy, particular but ecstatic.

From a beautiful, sunlit, evening in the dunes of Aberdyfi, Wales.

I am constantly astonished at the tonal range possible with paper negatives and at the sharpness obtainable with a well-made pinhole.

4x5 pinhole, paper negative. Click the image to view larger.

The Dart is a beautiful companion, continually moving, tracing lines, shapes, geometries of its own. Descending into the shallow moorland valleys hear the high, embracing pitch of the constant breeze punctuated by its roaring and gurgling. To be near it means to drink, to bathe; cool respite; thirst slaked by cold, peaty water of life.

The West Dart River - beautiful, cool and lively.

The intricately patterned granite monolith displays a texture reminiscent of the patterns in the clouds. The sky and land so frequently seem unified here on the moor.

I have fought shy of the truth of this photograph for some months now. My photographic eye by default favours contrast and shadow whilst here there is little of either, and, as a result, I nearly discarded this image. Now time has passed, I am revelling in the delicacy of the grey, the softness of the light, and a vivid memory of the dampness clinging to the lichen-covered granite.

Sharp wind wrapping ancient stone
Sun, time-telling, spiking earth.
Menhir piercing the millenia
with a howl and a sigh,
drawing its arc,
digging its home,
pointing the endless way.

Symmetry of tones and shapes on the wild moor.

My submission for this year's World Pinhole Photography Day

Paper negative, 50mm f150 4x5 camera (Chilli Camera)

Bellever and Powdermills: even in the lowlands, the atmosphere of the high moor is all around.

I feel slightly sheepish that I have had a few comments about my "pinholes" of Offa's Dyke. I should perhaps make it plain that the photos I am posting here are lensed photos taken nearly twenty years ago. I am posting them as a thought-provoker for myself for a possible revisit with a pinhole camera. The more I consider it, the more the prospect seems attractive and fascinating.

I am fascinated by the physical and mental processes of long journeys on foot.

Physically, complete mobile self-sufficiency changes one's view of what is essential in life when everything has to be carried. Lightweight cutlery, for example, assumes an unusual beauty for its marriage of function and efficient design. As does the strength and flexibility of a simple boot lace which inevitably catches one's glance hour after hour.

Mentally, the solitude and the unrelentingness of a two-week walk can be daunting and at times dull. By paying attention to each new scene, sound, smell, vision - and here photography enhances the experience immensely - the enforced meditation of the second-by-second stepping literally changes one's mind; makes one less a visitor and more a co-exister with all things on the path, around it and above it.

As at the moment I endure an enforced break from making new prints and negatives, I have been drawn back to this journey I made in 1991 when I walked Offa's Dyke on the border of England and Wales, from South to North. Along the way I photographed whatever appeared to sum up the experience of the moment, later compiling the images in a notebook. I chose not to write anything in the book except the name of the location and the distance travelled from the start of the route.

Foot journeys never seem to leave one's consciousness. Perhaps the drum-beat regularity of the rhythm they demand etches itself on the mind in ways which the inherent rapid variety of other ways of travelling cannot. This, combined with revisiting my photographic notebook made at the time, is making me consider a 20-year anniversary re-walking of the route with a light cardboard pinhole camera and a couple of films. I have an intuition that it will be a satisfying and illuminating thing to undertake.

Here are the first three photographs taken in the extreme South of the path.