At the top of the steps

Today’s image is of the pedestrian footbridge that crosses the railway line at Heyford station. We stopped here actually to take a look at the Marina on the side of the Oxford Canal that runs directly alongside the railway.

The bridge was painted a rather unremarkable blue with yellow painted handrails. It was the geometric lines that attracted me so I fired off a few shots, eventually widening out to 16mm – but without a clear idea of how this could make a decent image.

In fact I fully expected to take one look back home and delete them. But…In situations like this, there seems to be a subconscious part of my mind that sees something my conscious part doesn’t. Well, that’s a fancy way of describingt it, maybe in reality it’s just the stubborn part of me that wants to struggle to extract/rescue something from a rubbish initial capture!

Anyway, back home up on the big screen, I took one look and thought – B&W, high contrast, and maybe I’ll solarize it too. Ten minutes or less and I had the image I wanted. This was the one shot that had my wife at the top step. It needed that small human touch. The others, without her, are empty. A similar concept applied to Chalk Track Walker except in that one I had to find an appropriate figure to add. But in today’s case it really was my wife in the frame – I didn’t have to import her!