After a couple of days of heavier-than-usual winds in Tbilisi, calm fell. Having not been out for a while to my ponds with their reeds and rushes near the apartment, I set off with camera, mid-afternoon.
While the pools are usually garbage-tainted anyway, this time it was noticeably worse, the gales having knocked over three dumpsters in the area and scattered their contents far and wide. So much plastic! What a curse. A couple of days after my expedition, true, city workers did come and start picking up the rubbish on land; but they were not equipped to wade into the waters and clean them up too. So I must shoot around the invasive materials.
The water was practically mirror-calm, rarer still for it being late in the day. Nights here, and early mornings, are usually stiller than this time of day. I walked around the ponds with my 70-300mm long lens, relishing the perfect reflections of mixed chaos and order which the reeds gave me.
Some, indeed, looked just like little spaceships (my sci-fi eyes are always attuned to these), the stems bent back into the water and reflected into diamond shapes or others more fantastic. Mostly the out of focus background to these was more nature, rushes and trees; but sometimes I saw and shot cranes and other big machinery, because that was what was there. A single step in a different direction, up or down or to the side, would completely change the relationships and positions of these elements to each other, as happens in mirrors. I kept my camera’s aperture (light-gathering hole) large, to keep the focus tightly on what I wanted, and let everything else blur and not distract.
You can’t fight what the world gives you to photograph; you can choose either to shoot it or not. But you can choose every part of the camera’s controls. Shutter speed fast (to freeze things) or slow (to show motion), the latter handheld or tripod-mounted. Aperture wide for the narrow focus or narrow for the wide. ISO: sensitivity to light, introducing more grain as this get higher. Color space, or choice of black and white. Where and when you shoot, the local conditions.
Having grown up on fantasy and sci-fi as well as non-fiction, I am happy to turn the real world into the otherworldly via my camera. The idea is not always to represent hard reality, but to evoke a response in the viewer: not, as Ansel Adams wrote, what they really saw, more what they expect or want to see. Sometimes to bring forth nostalgia, or wonder, or sometimes even unease or horror if necessary. We CAN’T see motion blurred, or a scene with one part or none sharply in focus and the rest out of focus; our eyes don’t work like that. This is the fictional side of photography, as opposed to the documentary. I delight in it. The world has much amazement to offer the seeking eye.
I remember the furor when photography began to gain a foothold in the art world (its bicentennial will be next year!). It would be the death of painting! That never happened; the two flourished side by side in the 19th and 20th centuries as the new medium gained its masters and its media of capture advanced in capability. They are still advancing; and now we have billions of photographers, most armed with smartphones if nothing else. I don’t feel the urge to stand out. I’m just photographing what I love. If others like it too, that’s a bonus. Same if they want to buy it. But (hopefully not sounding too selfish), I’m doing what brings me joy.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
