Tuesday, July 08, 2008

broad beans, constraint, camera


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The flowers.

In recent years I have tried to write verse that rhymes. In doing so I found that looking for a rhyme often helped to develop the sense of what I was looking for and could produce something unexpected but true to the way I was thinking. At the back of my mind I felt that somewhere I had read something to that effect, but could not remember where. Now, in the early stages of rereading A la recherche du temps perdu, I realize that my source was Marcel himself. He is describing his mother's tact in asking a difficult question of the Prousts' neighbour, Swann, and how,when interrupted in her approach to Swann, she has to defer the words she has planned. "My mother, had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, like poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines."

I have found the camera I was looking for. What I wanted to complement my Sony Cyber Shot, which goes everywhere with me, was a machine with a zoom lens, which would allow me to photograph birds and animals at a distance, and at the same time to come in very close to a flower or an insect only a centimeter or so away. I had come to realize that an SLR was not for me, as the macro and zoom facilities would have required separate lenses, and unless I went for one of the more expensive SLRs, I would not be able to view the subject on the screen, having to rely on the viewfinder. The answer I discovered thanks to a helpful photographic shop, which understood my needs perfectly, is the Olympus SP 570UZ.

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