Photography is fraught with cliches. You couldn't get through a day without re-creating most of them. Even so, I'm in France, in a field of poppies and I stand awe struck and think, why not?
I'm guilty as charged when it comes to romanticising the natural world. Even though I don't enhance or photoshop at all. (I'm waiting until at least my seventies before I sit down to master that.) But maybe it's just how I want to focus on the world and what's in front of me? That for me a love of the natural world and the time to enjoy it came later in life and so it all moves me as if I'm experiencing it all for the first time?
These poppies appear to be bleached out with light and I struggle to adjust to a much lighter palette here. They are moist with dew drops in the early morning. They spread as far as the eye can see and mingle into a swathe of wild Irises in the distance.
I decide to check up on the Impressionist Artists as I imagine they all indulged in a fair bit of hazy blurry romanticism. Curiously I find that Monet one of my favourites, has used the same set of washed out orangey red and soft mossy green in his painting Poppies near Argenteuil
There are heavenly moments in photography. When everything surrounding it overwhelms the senses. The colours, the scents, the lasting impressions. These feelings live on in the images captured in that moment and can bring me back in an instant to a dewy morning in Le Val de Loire.
See more photos from France here
