Stitched up...

It is haymaking time at the cottage and the tractors are up and down the lane all day and all evening, only stopping when the sun begins to set and the night slowly starts to fall.

We had a couple beautiful sunsets at the cottage this weekend. They were even better earlier in the week, or so I’m told by Gaynor and Holly. I wasn’t there to see them, but the ones I saw on Friday and Saturday were very lovely and Holly took some pictures of the (even more beautiful) others for me for me - she knew I’d want to blog them (thanks Holly). A few of Holly’s photographs of Wednesday evening’s sunset are above, these are exactly as they came out of her new camera - good aren’t they.

On the subject of photographs, I have some new software on my computer that can take a number of separate pictures of the same scene and seamlessly stitch them together as a panorama. I love panoramic photography and I’ve been using the panoramic facility on my camera-phone for ages, but this software, and my new Polaroid, 7 mega pixel, m737t, digital, compact camera, makes it even easier. All I have to do is move my camera across the landscape, taking individual shots as I go, roughly joining them by eye, and the software does the rest at the click of a button.

My ‘Wales - across the fields, Friday evening sunset’ panorama below is actually three shots automatically stitched together through the wonders of software - incredible.

I sometimes wish that I owned some software that could do that with my life. If only there was some way of taking my life’s rough, almost joined-up episodes and experiences, analysing then, and then stitching them together seamlessly so that the ragged, messy edges, joins and overlaps were made smooth and shiny. What a perfect panorama my life could be.

As it is my life is a series of individual pictures taken on an ever changing array of cameras - plate, film, instant, and digital. Some are colour, others black and white, both under and over exposed, many out of focus; others have only half the subject matter in frame, several are damaged at the edges, a couple are ripped in half, and one is so badly burnt you can’t see it at all.

If only I could bring them all together, a single flawless whole, at the click of a button - colour correcting, sharpening, repairing and joining in that simple, single click, process. Unfortunately there isn’t software available to sort out my continuingly messy life (yet), so I guess that it’s down to me to keep on trying to smooth out the wrinkles, sew up the rips, and glue the pieces back together as I find them. What a job! That should keep me busy for a while.

Oh well, I always have these wonderful sunsets… you couldn’t dream those colours could you?